30 Poems In 30 Days — 9 Lessons Learned

Drew Bradley
8 min readJul 10, 2024

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The Writer’s Journey

In 2024, I started something new. As I sat in the back of high school classrooms as a substitute teacher watching the seconds go by, feeling more bored than the students I was monitoring, I began to write. Like so many others, I had grand illusions that one day I would write a book that would take the world by storm and be the next big thing. It took twenty-five years and a puzzling period of my life in between jobs to act on that great delusion. Only instead of working tirelessly away at a novel, I found myself drawn to a different form of writing that I had previously brushed past and disregarded: poetry.

Beginning to write poetry felt like uncovering a hidden oasis that I alone knew about. It allowed me to express feelings, themes, and things learned from both past and present experiences in a way that was artful and with a touch of mystery. Poems could be written fairly quickly and could be either long or short depending on what I had to say about the topic. Did I need several full stanzas to convey the point I was trying to make? Or were three or four short, pointed lines all that was required? Poetry was flexible, and allowed me to dance with and explore thoughts that have been lingering in my mind for a long time but have not been brought out in any way yet.

Over the course of a few months substitute teaching, I wrote about six poems. Not that many. Shortly after discovering this new gem of an experience, poetry took a backseat for me as I transitioned from substituting to the role of a full-fledged teacher as a replacement for another teacher who had suddenly left. In early June, I felt the itch again to start writing. I asked myself the question, I wonder what would happen if I wrote 30 poems in 30 days? Would all my writing be garbage? Would I run out of ideas? Would I produce anything good? Would I become a better poet? I decided just to dive in and try. As an additional challenge, it felt right to share what I had written publicly. I felt like I needed to place myself “in the arena” and see what would come of it. This article is a synopsis of what I learned through that experience; interestingly (probably because this is what I would consider to be my “initial foray into writing”) most of the ideas are applicable to all forms of writing and not just poetry.

  1. Write quickly… lest the magic (inspiration) escape.

We have all felt it. The familiar feeling of being struck by an idea for a poem or story that seems so good at the time, but for one reason or another, we are unable to actually start writing it out. By the time we get a chance to sit down, the idea is not quite so vivid and the colors of the story are not as bright. Sometimes, we will recognize that we do not have time at that very moment and make a few notes to ourselves to try and re-capture that magical idea that struck us at such an inopportune time. Even taking this precaution, I have found that I am unexcited and uninspired to write upon ideas that I thought of in the past that are not fresh on my mind. Inspiration comes and goes. It is best to realize that when the mysteriously creative magic of inspiration decides to visit us, we need to harness it for as long as possible. This means cranking out as much of the written work as we can while we are feeling inspired. Because, if we do not, then that work never really materializes or matures as we intended.

2. Worthwhile ideas do not come from a blank page.

Every writer, poet or otherwise, knows the feeling of staring at the paper in front of them and being unable to manufacture anything. Good or bad. This is because the process of sitting stuck with a pen in hand without any ideas to write about is not altogether that compelling of an experience. Almost every poem that I wrote over this thirty day period was tied to a specific memory from the past. Anything worth writing about came from actually living life. It came from some kind of blissful encounter or unwanted suffering from the past that, for whatever reason, has stuck in my mind years later. Memories that carried a nugget of wisdom or an idea worth questioning formed the basis that I could draw from for ideas for my own writings.

3. Nobody cares about your work.

I will be honest: traffic on what I was writing was low. Clicks, views, reads, and engagement as a whole was not anything impressive. Day after day, I wondered if my consistency in posting would lead to an increase in people who might want to read what I had written, but alas I can say with confidence that a very small number of people are interested in what I have to write. This may be true, but it is not all bad. In a way, it is comforting to know that people are not really invested in my poetry. My writing matters to me, but no one else really cares enough to be critical of what I have to say. This gave me confidence to post knowing that there really are not any repercussions of putting work out there that others might not like because so few people seemed to read it anyways.

4. Tune in to the world around you.

Don’t live life on auto-pilot. It is far too easy to simply go through the motions of life without thinking about what is going on around you. But, as we saw in point two, being observant of the world around us enhances our writing. It gives us a well to draw from to write about. There are “writing-worthy” things happening around you each and every day. I guarantee that. The question is: Are you looking for it?

5. Focus on what you actually want to write about.

At the beginning of the thirty days, I had more ideas than I had time to write about. Each of them had their own appeal and uniqueness to them. There would be times when a specific idea would hang around for a few days, and I felt a sense that I should write a poem about that thing because it was on my list of things to write about even if another idea excited me more at the time. It is okay to continue putting that idea off to the side if something else is more invigorating to write about. Again, see point one. Write quickly and do not get bogged down by things that you may kind of want to write about some day but do not want to write about most today.

6. Use any spare time to jot lines down.

Any time at all where you can turn your attention towards writing is valuable. Half of the poems I wrote over this thirty day period were either completely finished or mostly written in little pockets of time at work where I was not doing anything else. Not to go into an excessive amount of detail, but if I had five to ten minutes where I had to pick somebody else up or was being driven to a location, I used that time for writing. Considering poems are not as lengthy as something like a novel, writing one, two, or three lines can be highly impactful towards completing a good poem. Thus, taking every opportunity to write down any inspired lines goes a long way.

7. Change your environment.

Going back to the idea of being stuck in front of the computer screen, I found it greatly helpful to change my environment. If the words were not flowing well together, ideas were not coming to mind, and I felt like I had to force everything out, I would go for a quick walk or grab a coffee. While doing one of those two things, it allowed my mind to refresh itself and often, without even really trying, my mind would overcome my writer’s block. Somehow, walking around and taking a break would almost always lead to breakthrough in the poem that I was writing.

8. Some ideas should not be poems.

I can remember sitting down on day twenty-eight or so and trying to force a poem out (which is never a good idea to begin with). I wanted to write about a specific phenomenon I had seen that I thought most people could relate to. As I began writing, I realized that in order to say what I really wanted to say I needed a different form of communication than a poem. I needed to write an article about it instead; so, I stopped trying to coerce that specific idea into a medium it should not have been in and wrote a poem about something else instead. Easy. Do not make everything a poem.

9. Writing for long periods of time becomes a slog just like anything else.

I wrote more than just the thirty poems during this month of writing, and some days I wrote for five hours plus. I realize many writers write far more than this, but as the clock continued to turn on days where I wrote for more than an hour or two, I had another realization: though writing is enjoyable and more rewarding than many things, after a while it still requires discipline to do for extended amounts of time. Like any job, there comes a point when you just have to make yourself do it. Writing, often heralded as the pinnacle of the self-employed worker, is not some mystical thing that is always fun to do. Most things stop being fun to do after performing them for several hours. So, we can use this to our advantage. I would advise mostly writing in one to two hour blocks to keep things fresh and interesting to avoid some of the “burnout” of writing for multiple hours straight.

Stumbling upon poetry, and writing as a whole, has given me a channel and an outlet to focus my creative energy in a way that I did not have before. It has been quite nice to focus on something in life where I can create and construct work that I am proud of. I plan on writing more in the future whether it be in the form of poems, articles, or books. Feel free to check out some of the things that I have written during these past thirty days and thanks for reading.

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