The first and last Inktober I tried to complete was when I was a senior in high school. Armed with a stack of plain 3x5 index cards and fine point pens, I drew one a day for most days up until the final week when I suppose I got busy.¹

While I don't have those drawings anymore, I still remember how committed I was to doing them everyday. I'm pretty sure I was already the kind of person who lost interest in things easily, so my high school self's determination to stick it out for longer than a week is impressive to 2023 me. Even if I did it just to stave off boredom in class or whatever, that's still way more than I can say of my current self's ability to commit to shit.

I haven't done an Inktober since then, mostly because I know I have trouble with forming habits or routines. (I've talked about this before.) If I feel like I MUST do something regularly, the expectation alone feels like a huge burden and I forgo the whole thing altogether. It's why I've stopped buying class packages for workout things, even though it's my preferred method of exercise – it feels like investing in just another thing to put on my to-do list.

hack the challenge

I do like the idea of a month-long challenge like Inktober², but more for the amount of work you find yourself having completed by the end of it. I've been thinking about different ways to modify the challenge to meet that end, and randomly came across biko's Inktober 2023 Any% Speedrun.

Some things they did:

• Used tools they liked. Seems like common sense, but there's an urge to challenge oneself further by using Cool Special Tools or tools you want to get better at rather than tools you already feel comfortable using. For biko, the comfortable tool is a ballpoint pen.
• Eschewed any list of official prompts. Prompts serve as a welcome roadmap for some people, but like biko, I always thought they were such a hassle. I never liked the extra brainpower required to think of something fun and cute to draw, especially for words/concepts I didn't care about. Even when I did this challenge in high school, I just drew whatever I wanted.
• Totally nixed the "one a day" rule and just did as many as they could in bursts. This one was a game changer – I never thought to do it this way. Which is so silly to me in retrospect, because I already know I like to work in seasons.

Biko says something about the length of these October challenges that really resonated with me:

When I'm at the start and have a lot of motivation, I can make a lot of stuff in a short amount of time. If I have to partition each day to a drawing, I end up bottling all of the pent up energy that I want to use to draw, and I eventually lose all of it in a matter of days.

Yes! Exactly!!! I used to see the pace of the challenge as part of the challenge – like, you HAVE to do one every day. I thought it was important to avoid burning out and to learn how to manage your time or whatever. But framed this way, I realize that this part is what stopped me from trying Inktober again.

really? you NEVER tried it again?

This is a lie. I did start an October challenge this year, prior to reading biko's post. It lasted exactly five days.³ The rules of this self-imposed challenge were as follows:

1. Do something that you usually avoid because you think it's too hard or you're shit at it or it makes you nervous. (Ideally art-related/creative, but IRL stuff works too.)
2. Don't map out a list of fears in the beginning – just do one a day, and decide what you feel like doing on the day itself.
3. It doesn't have to be good or finished or publishable. Just do it.

I know now that Rule 2 was where it went wrong. I don't mind having a plan - and in fact, I like it, so long as I'm the one who made it. I ended up not wanting to think up more fears to tackle by Day 5.

I also fucked up by making myself a challenge that was so exhausting, especially given that attempting to do a month-long challenge in itself was already a fear. I was essentially tackling two fears at once at any given moment.

what did we learn from this episode

Stuff like Inktober is fun for a reason: It's a low-risk, high-reward challenge that gets your creative juices flowing. Whether the reward is "I have an excuse to draw everyday" or "I end up with a substantial amount of work done at the end" or whatever else is ultimately secondary to you enjoying doing it, so there's no need to stick to any arbitrary rules that suck that enjoyment out.

Again, it seems like common sense to do things the way you like! But people can forget that, so sometimes you need someone like you to point it out and make you realize you have more options than A) suffer or B) avoid. It's nice to know I can work with my idiosyncrasies and challenge myself in a way I find fun – and just in time for Huevember, too.

I recently bought a stack of 3x5 index cards, and I found that my old pens from high school keep ink like crazy and still work great. Here's a drawing from today that I did just because.

My favorite villager on Animal Crossing.

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1. I saved my data from the old Twitter account I posted them on, and saw that I'd dropped off posting about Inktober on the 22nd.↩

2. Though not actually Inktober, because the creator is kind of cringe.↩

3. Summary of my attempt to follow in another post, maybe? Maybe not. It really wasn't that exciting.↩