Writing Challenges & Prompts
By: Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Tags: Leadership, Self Improvement, Design, Writing, Entrepreneurship

Section 1: List of Challenges and Related Stories

Challenge 1: Create a story featuring your best stories.

This story, similar to your bios, is expected to showcase your writing capabilities. This story can include around five stories. You may consider even one story with details at a minimum.

However, the maximum is ten articles to make it a readable piece. It will be helpful to use a standard title such as “Best Stories of [Insert Your Name]”. You can choose your preferred subtitle. I plan to compile each story and include them in our promotion pack. This exercise can create visibility to your profile and stories. If you require further clarification, you can open a discussion thread on our Slack channel, and I will provide my input and guidance.

We compile stories submitted as response to this challenge in the attached story. We also distribute this story to our readers in our daily distribution list and newsletter.

Challenge 2: Create a story featuring the best stories of your selected writers.

Now that we have the best of best stories as assessed by the writers, as part of our cross-pollination goals, I want to propose each writer to choose one or more writers and review their stories from their selected stories.

You need to review each story in a bundle. Leave a comment, tweet the story and write a brief note about what you learnt from each story. You share your views of the reviewed stories in your story titled “Review of Stories [Insert Name]”.

There are five reasons for recommending this activity. Our publication was established based on cross-pollination, reciprocity, diversity, collaboration, synergy, and serendipity principles. Here are my ideas:

1. You have a new powerful story opportunity to feature someone’s work. 2. You get a chance of reviewing several articles from a single writer and gain a deeper understanding of this specific writer. 3. You build a stronger relationship with the writer and turn that writer to your fan. 4. You learn new writing styles, discover new topics, and broaden your knowledge. 5. This activity can undoubtedly create serendipity.

We keep the stories submitted as response to this challenge in the same story for easy access and distribution.

Challenge 3: Create testimonials for your favorite writers.

To support our cross-pollination values, I recommend you to create at least one testimonial for another writer whom you admire. Please introduce your selected writer, including some sample stories. I plan to use these testimonials as an extension to our writer bios. As you know, 250+ writers presented their bios. We share these bios with our readers. Some readers have already become familiar with some writers, and they specifically ask more stories from them. It is an honor for our writers. Adding testimonials to our distribution list can further enhance the visibility of our writers.

I provided some sample testimonials in this bulletin.

Challenge 4: Create theme-based stories to prepare for curation.

I plan to create a new theme-based article collection to give a great reading experience to our followers. Some readers want to explore stories based on classified themes.

The purpose of this collection is to categorize stories based on keywords. For example, the first concept I propose is writing an article about “jealousy”.

Based on your experience and background, you can create a story with an attractive title of your choice as long as you use the term “jealousy” is identifiable in your title or subtitle. You can choose relevant tags.

I believe you can create unique stories by looking at the term from your angle.

One of the objectives of this new challenge is to increase the chance of curation. Therefore, we need to consider some preparation work.

The articles in this challenge must adhere to Medium curation guidelines.

You may consider your stories to get peer-reviewed by sharing your draft with one of your fans. If you don’t have fans yet, you can request reviewers in our Slack channel.

You can gain ideas from the curated articles. For example, you can check the presentation and styles of curated articles. One way of finding curated articles is to check the Medium topics.

You can also review the stories curated from our publication writers.

Challenge 5: Share your monthly gems.

The purpose of this writing challenge is to enhance collaboration and build a relationship with your readers. This challenge may reflect your monthly experience with your followers.

I propose writing a story each month describing who you followed and what you explored from these followers. You can tag the follower account and write in a way that you are conversing with this specific follower. For example, I found your story XYZ and found the following points interesting. My take away points from your story were XYZ.

You can select as many followers and their stories as you explored within a month. I recommend these stories in a conversational tone to the owner of the content and aiming to give useful, practical, thought-provoking, entertaining, inspiring, motivating points to your readers.

We aim to kill two birds with one stone. While showing our appreciation to the content owner, we can also provide useful content to our readers.

To collect these stories in the repository and distribute to our readers, we need to standardize the heading. Your story heading can be “Monthly Gems Discovered by [Insert Your Name]”, and you can put an attractive sub-title. You can even choose a kicker “ILLUMINATION Writing Challenge”.