Create Something! (Inktober-inspired plans plus an update)

First thing’s first, hello! It’s been a while! No, I’m not dead—but close. I’m in college! I survived my first month. Woohoo!

Move in Day featuring my lovely sister :)

Now we can continue. It’s the first day of October, and for a lot of people on the internet that means a month of challenge and creativity. You may know what I’m talking about if you’re on YouTube as much as I am, which is a lot. Artist channels are participating in “Inktober” which is a challenge to complete a drawing every day in October. This was started by a man named Jake Parker in 2009. His intentions were simple: to improve his skills with pen and ink. Now I think the trend has gone beyond that—that it could be a drawing of any medium (I could be wrong on this) every day. There is a prompt list for each day, but many people just stick to the main principle: a drawing a day. For vloggers, it is the first day of “Vlogtober.” The concept is the same except the creator makes a vlog every day instead of a drawing. And, of course, with a simple Google search, I found that there is also “Blogtober.” I’m sure there are similar challenges for any other hobby as well.

This may be absurd of me to think, given that I just started college (you can clearly see how much I’ve been able to post since that happened), but I want to be inspired by this. I want to try to make something every day. I want to take a little time—even just 20 or 30 minutes—to creating. Maybe it will be a drawing, maybe it’ll be a poem, or maybe I’ll work on a new song.

Part of the premise of this—at least to me—is that it gets you thinking. It gets you creating no matter what. What you make doesn’t have to be good. Hopefully you make some things that you like, but not everything will be perfect, because that’s not the point. Creating every day will help you to revive your creativity and your mind. The hardest part of creating art of any kind is starting. Rough drafts are some of the most daunting things in the world. Blank pages are scary! This “Inktober” challenge brings you face to face with the blank page every day.

So, this is what I’m going to do, and what I’d like to invite the rest of you to do, too. I’m going to create something every day. Like I said earlier, it could be anything. One day I may write a song, and one day I might only have a doodle in me (I won’t count the doodles that I do in class, but you can if you want). Because I have little time, I won’t make it a rule that I have to finish everything the day I start it, but I want to put at least a significant amount of effort into it. To keep this challenging, I want to start something new every day. Sure, I can continue what I start, but it won’t count towards the challenge if it isn’t new.

I also hope to be posting at least once a week. I know posting every day would be a lot (I doubt that they’d all be read, anyway), and the quality would probably suffer. I’ll keep it to once, mayyyyyybe twice a week. Lately, I’ve been feeling that the content I write hasn’t been post-worthy, so some of what I post this month might be pieces that I wrote earlier, but didn’t post. That’s another great learning aspect of Inktober. It forces you to create even when you don’t feel that it’s any good. This is also why I may post twice a week. It may be one new post and one older one. Or it may be one post plus one update on what I’ve made through the week. I do intend to record my progress and show what I’ve done. Because I always write in pen and usually prefer to use ink in drawings—or at least in the final product—I’ll probably keep referring to this as Inktober to keep it simple.

I very strongly encourage you to participate as well, even if it's small, even if it isn't every day. Of course you can feel free to share what you've done (I will be), or keep your little creations to yourself. But have fun! Make something that wasn't there before!

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" —Scott Adams