The Renew and Review Writing Challenge Starts December 1

 The Renew & Review Writing Challenge is now full! To receive information on future courses, leave a comment beneath this post saying “mailing list” or go here.

How happy are you with your writing life? Are you getting all the readers you want? Are you publishing as much as you would like? Are you thrilled—or frustrated? Excited—or  disappointed? Or are you somewhere in between?

How sure are you that your writing is absolutely as strong, creative, and inspired as it could be—and that it is growing day by day?

Is your writing life joyous, fulfilling, fun and hopeful, or is there something lacking?

When was the last time you did an in-depth analysis of your writing strategies?

If you’re like most writers (myself included), you probably don’t sit down very often to analyze what is and isn’t working in your writing life. You try to write as often and as well as possible. You go through the motions of marketing and submitting. You think you’re doing the best you can. But have you actually ever gone over your writing life in a clear-cut and systematic way to determine what is supporting and nourishing your work and what can and should be changed?

Try to imagine a serious athlete who never assesses whether she’s training the best way. Or an entrepreneur who never evaluates his marketing strategies. It’s pretty clear those professionals would be wasting a lot of time and failing to see the results they were hoping for.

Writing is no different. To make sure you are the best writer you can be, that your writing life is rich and satisfying, and that you are heading toward the success you deserve, you must step back and take a good look at what you’re doing right—and what you aren’t. And what better time to evaluate ourselves than the end of the year?

Throughout the month of December, I’ll be offering a free 30-day Review and Renew Writing Challenge. Every day from Dec.1^st – 31^st (except Christmas Day), participants will receive in their email a short, guided exercise designed specifically to help you assess, reconfigure, and renew you writing and your writing life. Sessions will include:

• Fun and enlightening exercises
• Inspiring writing prompts
• Unique and insightful quizzes
• Suggestions, ideas, guidance, and resources

–all focused on leading you to clarity about your writing and help you develop new, powerful strategies that will work for you in the coming year. The 30 steps are easy and entertaining. Whether you have just a few minutes a day to work on them—or want to go deeper and spend hours—they will offer you insight and clarity about your writing.

Each week of the 30-Day Review and Renew Writing Challenge will focus on a different theme:

Week 1: Review (Dec. 1 – 7). The objectives of Week 1 are to identify your achievements, disappointments, “speedbumps,” and triumphs of 2013. You will review your progress throughout the months, reflect on what you’ve accomplished, and shine a spotlight on how your writing year went.

Week 2: Evaluate (Dec. 8 – 14). Once you have reviewed your writing life over the past year, you will do a deeper, more intensive analysis designed to assess what you did well and what you could have done better. What nourished your writing? What hindered it? What factors, external and internal, got in your way? What did you do to avoid problems and to deal with them when they arose? When and how did you stumble? This section of the Challenge will help you take an honest look at your writing strategies:

• When, where, how, and how often you write.
• Whether excuses and negative thinking get in your way.
• What specific strengths you draw on.
• Who supports you—and who is sucking your energy dry.

By the end of Week 2, you will have a new, clear understanding of your writing life.

Week 3: Re-Vision (Dec. 15 – 21) In this week, we will turn out sights to the coming year. Based on the clarity and understanding gained in the first two sections of the Challenge, this week will focus on what we can change in the coming year. What are your goals for 2014? How do you know whether your goals are workable and appropriate? What intentions will you set for daily, weekly, or monthly writing practice? How will you avoid the weaknesses of the past and support the strengths?

Week 4: Confirm (Dec. 22 – 31 except Christmas Day) In the last section of the Challenge, we will take everything we’ve learned in the first three weeks to set up a Personal Action Plan for our writing lives. We will establish specific goals and objectives, claim the joy and success we will achieve in 2014, and determine where we anticipate being for the next Review and Renew Writing Challenge in December 2014.

This is far more than a set of “New Year’s Resolutions.” It is a revisioning and renewal of our writing and our writing lives.

The 30-Day Renew and Review Writing Challenge will be done totally by email, and is free to all members of Writing a Sacred Path.