Thanks for you interest in this little endeavor! It’s my first attempt at the 100 Days Project, so I thought I’d share a loose guideline and project history for anyone interested in joining.
The idea was born from weekly conversations with my friend Cynthia, an artist and community leader who I’ve known for over a decade. We first connected over music, vibes, and soon after I was inspired by her creative ethos. Cynthia first did the 100 days project in 2015, found the experience transformative, and later invited her ukulele community to join the 100 Days Ukulele Project in 2018. You can get her full story here.
The project was made popular by Michael Bierut, at the time teaching a graphic design workshop at Yale, who assigned his students to choose a design operation to repeat every day. He started this in 2006. You can read his own words about the project on the Design Observer.
Then in 2013, artist Elle Luna and friends began the project and designated Instagram the presentation platform of choice. The hashtag #the100daysproject currently has over 2.3 million tags!
As a graphic designer jumping back into freelance, it would make more sense to take on a design challenge. But I’ve always wanted to improve my writing skills. To clarify my thoughts. I find both visual and text-based communication equally important. And when it comes to the 100 Days Project, as hard and frustrating as it seems, progression seems all but inevitable. I’m not sure if I’ve ever committed to anything like this before. However, my life circ*mstances have changed drastically, and I now have the time and headspace for this challenge…I think.
I’ll be using Substack to track the project (thanks to my friend Etienne, who was the gateway to the platform). I love that it supports and caters to writers and readers, but is still user-friendly enough to easily add photos, videos, audio.
To participate, create a Substack account, follow this Substack publication, and join the chat thread to stay connected. I’m following Cynthia’s recommendations below, though the parameters you set is entirely up to you.
March 1st will be Day 1. The goal is simply to write something every day, and share it on Substack. You can create a new post under your publication, or write a note in the “home” section” (notes functions like tweets on the platform). The easiest way to participate might be to write on a piece of paper, take a photo, and upload it. That’s about it! I’m excited and nervous to begin together!
From Cynthia:
Aloha, fellow writers!
Excited to embark on this project. These are the loose guidelines we use for our 100 Days of Ukulele Project, which I’ll adapt for the Writing Club. This project belongs entirely to you, so you can further adapt to suit you!
Goal: Write everyday. Whether it’s one sentence, five minutes of free writing, a story, a reflection, a poem, daily work on a longer story draft, the project is about asking yourself to show up for your writing everyday, in whatever form is manageable, writing whatever you are called to write that day. Writing can take many forms, and we can give ourselves permission to show up and explore without expectation of a presentable piece.
Sharing/posting: Do you have to share everyday? Not if you don’t want to. But I believe it helps with accountability to yourself to publish something small everyday, if just to acknowledge, I showed up today for my writing. Also, publishing everyday helps you get over the fear/anxiety/procrastination of letting go of a piece.
The Club: I’d suggest that we follow each other on Substack for the duration of the 100 Days to show support and accountability. We don’t need to read or reply to each other’s posts, we could just “like” it to acknowledge the act of showing up. But even then, we’re not doing it for outward recognition. We’re simply acknowledging that we are in this together. In our ukulele version of the project, we say “positive comments only.” For our writing version, we might choose to say “no feedback / feedback welcome.” We can leave that up to each writer. It’s important to set your own boundary of when you want feedback and when you don’t.
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