My Writing Game – origin and rules

Like many of us, I do not have the best memory. I’m constantly forgetting where I put the remote down just a moment ago (this applies to any hand held item: cooking implements, keys, my phone..), my boyfriend often tells me anecdotes of events that I have no recollection of, it takes me half way through the second viewing of a movie to realize I’ve seen if before. You name it, I forgot it. When it comes to learning new names, most of the time I don’t even try to learn them. I accept that I will only learn one or two names at once and ignore the rest. When I started university, I was thrilled when the two lovely ladies I introduced myself were both named Emily; one less name to learn!

Late last year I attended a friends party. The guests of the party were from a social group I am only on the fringes of, so I knew I’d be meeting lots of new people. After an hour or so I came across someone I’d met when I arrived. “Don’t tell me,” I said “Alice?”. And I was right! “Hooray!” I celebrated. “Ten points for me!”

This little interaction gave me the idea to award myself 10 “points”  for every name I learned. I didn’t get anything for the points, but i did celebrate every time i earned them. To my surprise, it worked very well. Naturally, after I had around 70 points I forgot where I was up to and stopped keeping track.

I have recently, finally, started having some success in weight loss. I’ve lost about 5kgs in 7 weeks. I owe this success to myfitmesspal.com. On this site you log the food you eat and the exercise you do and it counts the calories for you. It occurred to me, that this was a little like my name learning ‘points’ system, it worked like a game. Every day I am challenged to have a calorie deficient and I am rewarded with results.

So I have an idea to try and apply this game mentality to other aspects of my life. One of the things I would like to be doing is writing more. I’ve always enjoyed it but I know I will never get anywhere if I don’t write more. So, I will award myself “points” each time I write something, and post it to this blog. I will keep a record each month, and see if I can improve my score as time goes by.

This will be my scoring system:

Points:

10 points each day I make a post

10 points for each 100 words in a post

50 points for posting a (complete) fictional story

30 points for posting a review or article

5 points for each new follower

5 points for each comment on a post

I’d love it if others joined me in this challenge! Feel free to adopt my Writing Points system, or create your own tailored to the type of writing you’d like to do. Or, you could make a points system for some other goal you have.