The Power of the Internet Challenge-a-Long
On examining a little bit the received wisdom of the Internet.
I’m writing this essay on the tailend of the #1000wordsofsummer challenge and even though I promised that I would use this challenge to work on my novel, I’m cheekily sneaking this Substack in as one entry.
For those of you who don’t know, #1000wordsofsummer is an annual challenge started by the writer Jami Attenberg in 2018. The challenge is simple—for a two week period in early summer, you write 1000 words a day (or whatever the equivalent in your writing practice is like). Every day during the challenge, Jami and a slate of guest writers send out motivational letters from her Substack, and previous letters have been compiled into a book. There’s also a Slack channel for people that want to share their word counts with others and participate in the social aspect of it. These are a few of the accoutrements, but the core of the premise is simple—every day you sit your butt in a chair and try to write 1000 words, knowing that there are hundreds (now thousands) of people around the world trying to do the same thing.
I’ve tried this challenge every year since it started, and I’ve failed every single time—late May/early June, when it tends to take place, is usually a busy time for me. This year I’ve come closer to finishing than ever, even though I had to skip two days and have lurked more than contributed to the group Slack.
It’s one of the most delightful things I’ve ever found on the Internet. Every day there are strangers on my computer encouraging me, another stranger, to prioritize my own creative work. I’m not really saying anything new when I say that the Internet is a great place to find community with like-minded individuals, but it turns out that even engaging with a community like this superficially makes me feel a lot better about my creative practice.
Obviously the Internet still has an effect on my creativity. I notice that I am less capable of the deep work that I was capable of five years ago and have to bribe myself to get through writing periods with reading an article on Substack or some scrolling time. However, it’s these other pockets of the Internet that are forcing me to strengthen my brain again. My 1000 words will be written one way or another. My scrolling breaks just mean that it will take longer.
Another, simultaneous challenge that I am doing is the Jane Austen read-along challenge, hosted by the Substack The Austen Connection in honor of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday this year. Throughout the year, the newsletter is hosting a read along of all of Austen’s work, broken down into easily readable weekly chunks.
So far, the readalong has only covered the works by Austen that I’ve read already, Northanger Abbey, Sense & Sensibility, and Pride & Prejudice, but I still found that I got a lot out of the read-along experience. Reading the books slowly (although usually in the last two-three weeks of the schedule I race ahead and finish ahead of time because I can’t stand the suspense), then reading the weekly newsletter and the comments, plus occasionally composing a comment of my own made me think more deeply about some of the most thought-about books in the English language. Some of those thoughts even grew into newsletters of my own.
I love these readalongs. They remind me that I have a brain. They remind me that there’s a lot more to many books than you get from initially skimming them. They remind me that there are other people that also want to get more out of the books that they read and delve deeper into the themes (or just discuss which characters they find annoying).
Last summer I also participated in a Substack read-along of Middlemarch, a book that was vaguely on my list but I probably wasn’t going to get to any time soon. Instead, I wound up falling in love with Eliot’s work. The novel affected me deeply, including some of the ways that I thought about my own project.
These aren’t the only Internet read-along challenges of course. There’s also The Big Read by Jeremy Anderberg, various subreddits decorated to reading big classics together, and so on. Some of these are so popular that people even pay for them, showing how desperately some people want the experience of reading in community and being pushed to think about their reading.
These readalongs and the #1000wordsofsummer challenge are intertwined in my head for a few reasons. The first is that these are projects that try to create community in a very different way on the Internet. They are niche in their concept, but try to reach as wide an audience as possible. There is somebody guiding the project, setting a schedule, and providing guidance in the form of newsletters and analysis, but what each participant gets out of the project is up to them. Some just read along, others participate actively in the comments, while others create deeper relationships with people they connect with through the project. Everyone is present due to a shared love of the written word, both creating it and consuming it.
I also love the way that these projects believe that fundamentally, a creative, thoughtful life is something that is for everyone. All you need is an internet connection and something to say. You don’t need an MFA degree to write literature or an English degree to give your opinion on what Eliot did with Dorothea’s characterization. Everyone deserves to have a space for their intellectual pursuits, whether you’re retired, working a full-time job, want to study but don’t have the money to go back, or just want a little extra thinking in your life. I wound up loving the readalong of Middlemarch so much I decided to go back to grad school and study English literature, but then was disappointed by certain aspects of my scholastic experience that were outside of my control. The read-alongs and creative challenges I found online are helping me scratch an itch I felt was missing from my degree program so far, and remind me why I bothered to try going back to school in the first place.
I have no argument for this essay, except to say that the Internet is sometimes nice despite the terrible things. Of course, I have noticed its effect on my creativity in terms of my declining attention span and tendency to couch all of my arguments in layers of disclaimers to prevent inevitable backlash. These are just some thoughts I’ve been having as people raise the alarm about our growing crisis of literacy and creativity. It does seem to be a shame that everyone is able to get into the literary sphere when it stopped being respected (or paid), but the access is still there. The readers and writers are still there. You just have to find them.