The 2025 Writing Challenge
I never set out to be a writer. I didn’t know that the simple act of writing could form the basis of a business as well as a creative life. I started writing in earnest almost fifteen years ago because I was told that email marketing was the way to make my web design business work. I began building an email list and writing regularly in an effort to become well known enough in my little corner of the world to drum up the work I needed to sustain me. All the teaching I encountered said you should market yourself as a definitive expert. Everyone was talking about building a personal brand and setting goals for market domination. None of which I was really interested in, I quickly realised.
Writing is the thing that drives my work
I was drawn to writing personal stories and unearthing my own humanity rather than putting out expert think pieces. I was surprised to realise that the writing I was doing for my marketing was scratching a deep itch I hadn’t been able to name. So I started to lean more into the writing and ignored the marketing best practices. It was much more important to me to be known well than to be well known. It was around that time that I gave myself permission to try to make not just my writing, but all of my work, about expressing who I am. Shedding any kind of professional persona or posturing and being myself in every aspect of my work. That’s when things started to click for me. Work and business can seem complex and complicated sometimes but when I stop and take a deep breath I remember, it can be very simple at its essence. The thing that has driven my work for years is this simple act of writing and sharing that writing publicly. I sometimes stop and marvel at how an act as small as that has opened up so many opportunities and relationships all over the world.
I’m in the midst of preparing for the retreat I’m running in Donegal this April. As ever, people are travelling from far and wide to join me in the place where my story is rooted. This year’s participants are flying in from the UK, Australia, Colombia, Canada and all across the US. Every month I speak to consulting clients across the world from my spare room in south east London. Almost every single one of these relationships began because they joined they my email list and read my writing. The internet is kind of magic in that respect; I shudder to think what job I might have ended up in were it not for the internet.
The Only Thing That Matters
But it’s not just the internet that has enabled me to build my audience and do my work. It’s writing. Writing is the real magical thing. I like Stephen King’s description of writing as “an act of telepathy.” He says, “I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We are not even in the same year together, let alone the same room… except we are together. We are close. We’re having a meeting of the minds.”
it just matters that I keep going
I wrangled for such a long time with the conundrum of whether or not I should call myself a writer. Whether or not I was “allowed” to call myself that. But I’ve long since stopped worrying about it. The only thing that matters to the work – and to me – is that I keep writing.
The thing I’m most sure of is that my writing is the best explanation of what I do and what my work is all about. There will never be a job title or clever elevator pitch that captures it and that’s okay. I repeatedly see people sharing my writing as a way of introducing someone new to my work and I’m more than happy with that.
No Evolution Without Writing
My work has evolved and changed over the past decade or so but the one thing that has remained consistent is writing. In fact, in many ways I believe the work was able to evolve because of the writing. It’s how I think.
A client once told me I was like an archaeologist, helping him dig through his story and carefully dust off the artefacts of significance to make sense of what had gone before. It was funny to hear it because that’s kind of how I think about writing and what it does for me.
Writing is the work of excavation
Writing is the work of excavation. It’s a sense-making process. I have all of this stuff swirling round in my head but it’s as yet unarticulated. Without the excavation that writing brings I don’t know what I think or what I know. Without that excavation the potential in my work and my business remains untapped. When I write consistently something seemingly magical happens. Stories emerge, ideas take shape, new work is born.
Over the past ten years I’ve made a ritual of beginning my year with a four-week writing series. It sets the tone for my year. It’s the perfect container for new ideas and has become the backbone of my work in many ways. I don’t worry about the specifics of what I’m going to create over the coming year because I know as long as I engage with the writing challenge, there will be plenty of raw material to work with.
A Ritual to be Shared
For the eighth year running I’m not only starting the year with a four-week writing series, I’m asking you to join me in the challenge.
Unearth the gemstones in your work and your thinking
Writing – and publishing – every weekday for four weeks is an intense process but it is rich and transformative. It’s the best way I know to unearth the gemstones in your work and your thinking. The writing challenge and daily prompts will force you to articulate your deeper ruminations. It’s a way to go from an amorphous cloud of thoughts and ideas to something tangible and communicable.
Over the past few months, as ever, previous participants of the Writing Challenge have been asking, “When is the Writing Challenge starting? I’ve been looking forward to it.” They are getting ready. Some are excited about the burst of momentum it will give them again. Others have half-formed thoughts swimming around their head that they know will become concrete by the end of the four weeks of writing. And some – perhaps all, me included – have a pang of trepidation about what they will uncover in themselves and what they might be called to write about.
The 2025 Writing Challenge, starting on February 7th, will focus on peeling back the next layer of your story. The layer that is still hidden to you, that couldn’t have been revealed until this very moment in time. Our story ripens with every passing day. The story you’re able to tell today you couldn’t possibly have told yesterday.
The daily writing prompts for this year’s challenge are designed to unearth hidden moments from your past. The moments in which your work, your philosophy and your genius were seeded. You will be invited to choose a theme to explore in your writing and the writing prompts will help to reveal the story of your relationship with that theme over time.
The 2025 Writing Challenge will focus on peeling back the next layer of your story
Story and place are intricately linked. Every part of our story is rooted in place. Be it a physical location in the landscape, on the map, in a building, in our bodies, or a metaphorical place in our mind or soul, place provides the context for our story.
After a decade of doing one-to-one story work with clients, I have observed that sometimes there are themes or parts of our story to which we don’t have conscious access. We have a sense of something more to uncover, a deeper connection to be made, an integration awaiting. We can smell it, taste it even, but it lies just beyond the borders of our consciousness. And still, on some level we know it completely.
The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas coined the term the Unthought Known. It refers to things that we are unable to articulate or directly think about, yet still, somewhere inside ourselves, we know it. One of the things that writing has done for me is helped me move things from unthought known into my conscious awareness. And I’ve noticed that place is often the thing that provides a way into these out-of-reach parts of our knowing.
I’m currently writing a book that tells my personal story but also turns over family and cultural stories. It is firmly rooted in the places of my formation and my present life, so I’ve been thinking about the connection between story and place in a deeper way than ever before. The places of our lives know things. They can reveal our story to us if we take the time to enquire.
The prompts for the 2025 Writing Challenge will all relate to story and place in some way. Over the course of the four weeks we will explore the physical and metaphorical places of our lives and discover what stories they hold. Helping people uncover their story is at the heart of so much of my work and has been for years now, so the series of prompts for the challenge will also be crafted based on my understanding of story structure and narrative arcs.
When we look at our life and the origin story of our work and curiosities through a fresh filter, we shine a light on new areas and our understanding of ourselves and our work can’t help but deepen.
The prompts in the 2025 Writing Challenge will lead you through four weeks of discovery and help you reveal new insights about your story and your work. I’ll also be kicking the whole thing off with a Writing Challenge Masterclass where I’ll talk about my writing challenge approach and my approach to story work. The Writing Challenge Masterclass will be available to access from Thursday 6th February.
The Writing Challenge is an opportunity for you to widen your audience, deepen your connection with them, and add to your body of work in a very tangible way. But it is also a sense-making exercise. The whole process will help you make sense of what your work is about, what’s truly unique about it, and what it is precisely that you’re trying to say.
My hope for you as a Writing Challenge participant is that you end up writing pieces only you could write.
Introducing The 2025 Writing Challenge
I’m inviting you to join me in a four-week writing challenge starting on Friday 7th February 2025. Here’s how the challenge works:
Every weekday for four weeks (we’ll have weekends off) I will guide you through the writing challenge. I’ll send you a writing prompt each morning directing you on what to write about. I’ll join you in the challenge and will write a piece each day that serves as an example of the prompt in action. You can publish your daily pieces to your email list, on social media, on a blog, Substack, or to any other audience you have.
The daily writing prompts I’ll send you are designed to uncover the next layer of your story, and so, the next layer of your body of work. The prompts are informed by the storytelling model I use and whilst the goal is not to end up with 21 pieces that create a coherent narrative, by the end of the 21 days you will have scratched at many key elements of your story and your audience will feel like they have a really good sense of who you are and why you’ve come to care about the things you care about.
You will be encouraged to choose a theme that you would like to explore with your writing. That topic doesn’t have to be specific to your work, it just has to be something you’re curious about and want to explore at a deeper level. It can be directly related to your work or completely unrelated. Themes I have explored in past writing challenges include uncertainty, place, self-disclosure, story, gentleness, and cultural forces.
When you register for the Writing Challenge you’ll be invited to join my private online Writing Challenge Community. I used to do this in a Facebook group, but I have now created a private standalone space away from Facebook for us that will be easy for you to access on your computer or phone. This is where you can come together with the rest of the Writing Challenge community. It’s where we’ll share our writing with each other throughout the challenge. In the private community you can talk to other members who are taking part in the writing challenge as well as ask any questions you have as you go through the challenge. I am obviously biased but my customers are wonderful humans and the community is filled with insightful and generous people who are committed to doing the work only they can do and are willing to openly explore and share their journey with the rest of the community.
A key part of the Writing Challenge is not just writing something each day but actually having people read it. To get the most value out of the writing challenge you need to have some skin in the game. Having readers makes it real. So whether or not you choose to share your daily writings with your audience, I encourage you to share them in our private community space. In the community we can read each other’s writing, learn from each other and offer support.
The value in this Writing Challenge is in actually doing the writing. To give you an extra incentive, anyone who completes the challenge will get access to a bonus live Writers Group session with me on Zoom where there will be the opportunity to reflect on each other’s work and ask me any questions you have or just share your experience of the challenge. I’ll host multiple sessions to keep the groups small enough so that there’s time to hear from everyone. To be eligible for one of these group sessions, you must complete the challenge by writing each day and sharing it in the private community.
Walk away with a body of work that reflects who you are
If you commit to the Writing Challenge then at the end of the four weeks you’ll be amazed at what you’ve written, the reaction it has generated and how much work you’ve created in such a short space of time. When I did my first writing series, I wrote 18,260 words in four weeks. The average non-fiction book is around 50,000 words. I couldn’t believe how much I’d written in a month. But this is about more than quantity.
We are constantly being told we should be ‘creating content’ to build an audience online. But I am not interested in encouraging you to write just anything and contribute to the deafening wall of noise that is the internet on any given day. I’m inviting you to say something that’s true, and that only you can say. Something that matters to you. If you give yourself to the process you’ll walk away from this writing challenge with a body of work that reflects who you are and that connects with the people who get what you are all about.
How Much Time Should You Spend Writing Each Day?
In a pinch, it’s possible to do the Writing Challenge in 30 or 40 minutes a day but I recommend scheduling an hour a day for writing. Do what you need to do to find that hour; it will be the most valuable hour of your day. Get up an hour earlier each day or finish your regular work day an hour earlier and use the final hour of the day for writing. That’s how I did my first writing series. I’d let my ideas percolate through the day and then spend the final hour of the day writing. I’m a night owl so sometimes I stayed up an hour later to write if I needed to. Here’s what I’ve learned: when you make the commitment to yourself, to me and to the rest of the group, you somehow find the time.
when you make the commitment, you’ll find the time
It’s worth remembering that writing is not something you have to do sitting behind a desk either. For some people writing while on the move is the way their brain works best. Writing and exercise go very well together. I’ve been known to go for a run or a walk, let the ‘writing’ flow in my head and then pause when I need to quickly type the words that are spilling forth. So if you’ve got a regular exercise routine or a daily walk ritual then that’s a perfect time to write.
Years of Progress in Weeks
If you want to get your ideas and stories out there this year, if you want to grow your audience and put yourself into your work, if you want to create a bank of meaningful writing to use in your work, then I’d love to have you join me for the four-week Writing Challenge starting on 7th February 2025.
Join me for the 4-week Writing Challenge starting on 7th February 2025
Most challenge participants will produce more meaningful, quality writing in this four weeks than they did in all of last year. My guess is you have years of experience, knowledge and wisdom but much of it is still locked inside your head because you haven’t had the time, opportunity or focus to get it out to the world. This is your chance to do that. When you commit to spending four weeks putting it out into the world you experience all of those years of effort finally coming to fruition. The momentum you’ll gain from the writing challenge may very well carry you through the rest of the year.
The Writing Challenge begins on Friday 7th February 2025. Register now.
Your Writing Challenge Registration Includes:
- Writing Challenge Masterclass: In the masterclass I walk you through my Writing Challenge mindset and how I approach any writing sprint like this. I’ll also talk more about my understanding of story structure, the relationship between story and the body, and how that has informed the prompts we’ll be using. I’ll also talk about my approach to short form storytelling. The Writing Challenge Masterclass will be available to watch from Thursday 6th February.
- Daily Writing Prompts: I’ll send you a writing prompt each morning inviting you to write something in response to it. This year’s prompts are informed by the connection between place and our story. Each prompt will be open enough to be interpreted in many different ways so you will always be in control of what aspects of your story you want to explore, and what parts you would like to leave undisturbed for now. The challenge as a whole is designed to uncover a fresh layer of your story.
- Access to my private online Writing Challenge Community: Get direct access to other community members who are exploring the work only they can do. We’ll support each other as we write our guts out during the challenge and beyond. The connection and conversation that happens in the community in response to the writing people are sharing is many people’s favourite part of the whole writing challenge experience.
- Writers Group session with me: If you complete the challenge – that is, if you complete the writing for each day and share it in our private community – your prize is a live Writers Group session with me on Zoom where there will be the opportunity to reflect on each other’s work and ask me any questions you have.
The Writing Challenge begins on Friday 7th February 2025. Register now.
What People Are Saying About The Writing Challenge:
I appreciated the Be Yourself Writing Challenge for several reasons. I appreciated being in the community that Megan has established. I think a good name for it would be "The Cocoon". It's a safe place to wrap around yourself; a place where reflection and growth can occur. In this environment the daily prompts were skillful in helping me dive deeper into my past experiences. Unarticulated thoughts that had been floating around my head began to crystalize.
Stephen Harris
The reward for the modest investment and commitment has been to provide me with insights that have allowed me to start communicating with my audience on a level I couldn’t have achieved before the challenge. I’d heard about the theory and understood it, but I hadn’t committed to actually doing it, the challenge and the group provided me with the drive, the forum to deliver it too, and the feedback and encouragement I needed.
Lewis Bacon
I found the use of prompts really inspiring. Each morning I looked at the new prompt and sometimes my heart sank! But however impossible it seemed, I found inspiration would strike, usually in the afternoons when I went for a walk. I found this a powerful approach that challenged my creativity.
Chris Sissons