New Year, New Starts 2026
Get the ball rolling before the New Year
New Year New Starts is my yearly writing challenge. The challenge is simple. Write the start to three separate stories and publish them on Jan. 1 2026. The rules are simple:
Write three story starts
Each start must be at least 500 words and less than 1000 words
It’s the start not chapter one
Each story start must be unique.
Don’t rewrite the same story three times, or obviously copy someone else’s story hook.
Writing in one universe is allowed: it’s good worldbuilding.
Publish it where the world can read it on Jan. 1, 2026.
That’s it. Go, have fun. If you share it hit it with #NYNS2026 so I and everyone else can find it. I will be looking forward to what you all say and produce.
If you want the reasoning behind the challenge I’ll explain it.
Around 2023 I realized that I, and a good number of other novice writers struggle with writing good story hooks. Thus I came up with this idea to get more hooks written. If one wants to practice most pieces of writing it’s easy enough to do almost all of that over the course of a book. In 70,000 words there may be 35,000 words of dialog, 10,000 of description, and 25,000 of action. Yet there is only one hook. Writing short stories may help as each short story needs a hook, an opening, yet a full short story again ends up with more of the other bits and only one hook.
Thus this challenge. Get three hooks written in a month. Probably not enough time to turn all three into short stories, and I’d recommend having them be the opening gambit to something longer. Because the more the hook has to ‘carry’ the better it should have to be, and thus the more one would learn from trying to create it.
This is one of the two reasons why I say push them out to the world. If we can see them we can comment on them, ask questions about them, poke holes in them. Steel sharpens steel and with out anything out there then there’s not anything we can talk over. For those who know that all comments will be universally positive by publishing three starts, one can get A/B/C testing with their audience should they be looking for their next project.
It also gives those with blank page syndrome something to work with. Creating a ‘story granary’ where these ‘story seeds’ can be stored for later use. Which can be useful for when one needs to write but doesn’t know what to write on. The start is started, grow it see where it goes.
Lastly if you haven’t published anything before it’s a good reason to get out there and post something. Ideally we will all be able to comment and hopefully learn from each other. Those who are good writers show us how it’s done, those who aren’t well let’s figure out what works, and what doesn’t.
I will do my best to answer questions, and help advertise those who are participating. I know a few people who are going to get tagged when these rules go up.
Share this with someone you think should get in on the challenge, subscribe so you don’t miss anything else I put out. There’s a lot going up in the coming weeks.
