{"id":194,"date":"2021-05-01T21:53:03","date_gmt":"2021-05-02T03:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/?p=194"},"modified":"2025-10-04T08:27:42","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T14:27:42","slug":"6-ways-to-take-advantage-of-summer-as-a-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/2021\/05\/01\/6-ways-to-take-advantage-of-summer-as-a-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"6 Ways To Take Advantage of Summer as a Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, it\u2019s May 1st, so most of us are wrapping up school and have our eyes on summer.\u00a0 Maybe you have lots of plans (Yay for vaccines!) or a job, or perhaps you just plan to relax and play lots of video games.\u00a0 For myself, I\u2019m visiting relatives across the country with my family, then spending the summer with my long-distance boyfriend while hopefully completing an internship or some such useful activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Go to 6 Ways to Take Advantage of Summer as a Writer<\/a> to keep reading!<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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Whatever the case, now that we (probably) don\u2019t have homework essays claiming our word count goals, it\u2019s time to get on with the personal writing!\u00a0 It can be hard to figure out what to do after not having\/making as much time during the school year, so beyond just \u201cwriting more,\u201d here are a few ideas for how to take advantage of the summer as a writer.\u00a0 Some are explicitly about writing, others are related to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Get a job.<\/strong>\u00a0 Professional covers and editing, conference registration, writing tools like Scrivener or Canva Pro (for graphics), books, a blog domain\/hosting, and other such things generally require money to be able to obtain them.\u00a0 You don\u2019t need<\/em> these things to be a writer, but having funds is pretty darn useful as your career gets going.<\/li>
  2. Take a free course for skills related to writing<\/strong>, like MailerLite Academy<\/a> to learn about email lists and marketing, or one on graphic design.<\/li>
  3. Participate in a challenge.<\/strong>\u00a0 The next Camp NaNo<\/a> is in July, and Go Teen Writers<\/a> will likely be running their annual, summer-long 100-for-100 Challenge.\u00a0 If you\u2019re part of a writing group, someone there might be running a challenge of some kind too.\u00a0 If they aren\u2019t, hey, you could start one of your own!\u00a0 These kinds of things can be incredibly useful if you struggle to be disciplined and keep writing consistently without outside accountability.<\/li>
  4. Practice writing on a regular schedule<\/strong> if your schedule didn\u2019t allow it before.\u00a0 Set a regular time block, for example from 2-3 in the afternoon, or another goal for writing, and see how well you can stick to it over time.<\/li>
  5. Find and enter contests,<\/strong> or submit your work to a publication.\u00a0 Reedsy has a fun weekly contest<\/a> where you get prompts and can enter to win $50 by writing a story of between 1,000 and 3,000 words.\u00a0 And there are a ton of other contests and publications out there if you just start Googling.<\/li>
  6. Have fun! <\/strong>\u00a0Don\u2019t forget to go experience things, and then you\u2019ll know how to write about them if you have a character who does the same things.\u00a0 You never know when your characters might need to know about rock climbing, or decide to visit a theme park.\u00a0 Or, you might learn things about yourself and life that you want to write a blog post about.\u00a0 We writers aren\u2019t meant to be hermits – writing is part of our broader lives, and we have to have material TO write about.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Hopefully these give you some good ideas if you’re trying to figure out what the best way to use the summer is.\u00a0 This list is definitely not exhaustive though; if you have any more ideas, please share them in the comments!<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well, it\u2019s May 1st, so most of us are wrapping up school and have our eyes on summer.\u00a0 Maybe you have lots of plans (Yay for vaccines!) or a job, or perhaps you just plan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[30,29],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","tag-idea-lists","tag-summer"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}