What Activities Count?

A common concern for the Habit Pledges is how to count activities for GYWO. The bottom line is that GYWO intends to support your writing habit. If counting or not counting a certain kind of writing activity supports your writing habit, follow your heart. The guidelines listed below are designed to explain the intentions of GYWO and what we recommend. You’re welcome to use them to help make the best decision about your creative writing activities. If you have a question about the guidelines or an activity not listed, you may ask a moderator, but we trust you to make the best decision for you based on the guidelines provided.

Recorded Activities

Because GYWO is a writing community, we want to encourage all activities for the habit pledges to have a recorded element. That includes activities such as drafting or revising; outlining, planning, or brainstorming on paper; writing query letters or synopses; or completing world building or character sheets. Thinking about your project or chatting with your editor or best friend about your story may be essential for your process, but we’re encouraging you to record those thoughts instead of just thinking them. (Take notes during or after that discussion, for example.)

Support Activities

If you are publishing (whether that is self-publishing, traditional publishing, or posting fanfiction or a blog) you may have a lot of activities related to your writing life that are not active creative writing pursuits. While those activities are important to the writing life, we don’t consider those part of a writing habit. As such we recommend NOT counting activities related to posting your work, responding to reviews or comments, promotion, sales, emailing queries to agents or editors, designing covers or layout, maintaining a website or blog, or other tasks related to publishing or post-publishing work.

Generative AI & LLM

Get Your Words Out is a challenge designed to encourage YOU to write. The use of generative AI to write prose, poetry, or scripts is not in keeping with the spirit of GYWO. Any time spent working with text generated by an AI or LLM may not be counted toward your progress total.

If you use any kind of generative AI as part of your writing process, please do so with open eyes. AI datasets used for training have been unethically sourced, taking written words without permission or compensation. Carefully read terms of service before using LLMs as many include provisions that submitted prompts will be incorporated into their training data.

Generative AI is a problem for writers, artists, and other professionals associated with the publishing process, and GYWO supports publishing and hiring people.

School- & Job-Related Writing

Thesis work and works produced for a creative writing class absolutely count. If you work for a magazine or blog professionally, as a freelancer or staff writer, your job writing likely also counts. We recommend NOT counting work you were assigned that will not aid your writing life, such as a paper for a class outside of your field, or writing documentation for your day job unrelated to your writing career.

Why do we apply these restrictions? Because we want you to count things you write creatively and things you want to write, not things you have to write to pass a class or stay employed.

Time

The amount of time you put into writing may vary by day. Our guidelines recommend spending at least twenty minutes on your writing before checking off that you have written for that day.

You may work in short bursts or for sustained lengths of time. The habit pledge should be adapted to fit your writing process and should make sense for you and your schedule.