Rough Draft

Here's Everything You Need to Know About RDMO!

The first Rough Draft Month began on November 1st, 2024. The NEXT Rough Draft Month will be during June, 2025.

Rough Draft is a 30-day creative challenge led by a small group of writers and artists seeking to find joy and community in the creative process.

What is a "Rough Draft"?

Every great piece of art or literature starts as an idea - but it doesn’t stop there. A rough draft is your first attempt at taking on your creative project from start to finish. This process can be very daunting - but that's why we're here. RDMO will help you achieve your goals in a fun and community focused way.

Sharable Information: Instagram | Tumblr

Goal Tiers

Instead of a main challenge, we created 4 tiers (60K, 50K, 30K, and Flex) to create flexibility for your unique project. Examples of a Flex Goal include lines for poetry, scenes for screenplays, panels for graphic novels/cartoonists, and more.

Sometimes it's hard to do a month long challenge - but don't worry. To add even more flexibility, during June we added weekly goal options!

Pick the goal that fits your project and join us!

🌊 This month we will be tracking our progress together on trackbear.app - here's the link to our June leaderboard!

Community Events

One of the best parts about November creative challenges is the mutual support and encouragement during such a big project. Join our Discord to participate with the RDMO community!

Other Features:

🎶 Listen to & save our curated writing playlists

✉ Sign up for our email newsletter for updates, advice, and resources to help you meet your goal - like how to find inspiration for your next project!

🏅 Sticker Book - Achievement Collecting 🔑 Locked In - Word Count Game ⏰ Let Me Cook - Pomodoro Timer

+ More Coming Soon!

Our June challenge starts tomorrow! Are you ready for it? Here's a handy participation checklist with everything you need to know at a glance. Important links below the cut 🐠💙✨

🐠 Have you joined the leaderboard for June RDMO yet? 🐟

🌊 Have you heard that June is a Rough Draft Month?

We challenge you to devote time to a creative project in June, but you get to choose your own goal! 👀 Reveal the Mascots for our Monthly & Weekly Goals Below

🚨 June is a Rough Draft Month! 🚨

Hey, team! It's been a minute! We had an incredible turnout for #RDMO24 last November, and we wanted to share some stats and celebrate our community's achievements. If your words are reflected in this total (if you joined with a trail on Trackbear, they are), we want to thank you again for your support and participation. We hope that you'll continue creating with us in the future 👀 ✨

Hey Friends!

As I reflect on November, I am so grateful for the camaraderie and fun that we had during the first RDMO.

🗻 If you hit (or exceeded!!) your initial goal, congratulations! 🌳 If you adjusted your goal and crossed a new finish line, well done! 🐺 If you got started but life got in the way, congratulations are still in order! You made progress towards your goal AND you prioritized what you needed in the moment. Life can be unpredictable - but all the planning, work, and excitement you put into your project will be beneficial to all of your future endeavors!

No matter where you fall on the spectrum, we are proud of you and grateful that you chose to create with us.

🏅 Get Your Rewards

*Note: Got a friend who also worked on a creative project this month but hasn’t heard of RDMO? Share with them so that they can have the joy of a reward after all that hard work! Want to know what's next for us? Read more below the cut.

Thank You for a Wonderful November

As we consider different options for the future of RDMO, many people have suggested multiple months of challenges. While our Discord will be a year round space, we think our next step would be to consider bi-annual challenges to ensure each can be run smoothly and thoughtfully. Please vote in the poll below so that we can gauge interest and plan!

November is here! We're so looking forward to the month ahead, and we wanted to drop by and let you know that we're here to cheer you on.

We’re also excited to announce the launch of our website, as well as some features that you can find there such as...

Locked In - a writing game to help meet your daily goal!

Let Me Cook! - a pomodoro timer to help you focus with writing, art, and all creative endeavors.

Sticker Book - a unique way to collect achievements along the trails!

And, finally, we want to thank you for being here. RDMO is a passion project for our admin team. We have been working around the clock since September to create a challenge that gives you a fun, collaborative, and rewarding experience. We will continue to update the website and social media throughout the month, but we’re writing our novels as well! Follow rdmoHQ on instagram to see us live blog our #RDMO24 experience (and don’t forget to tag us in your updates everywhere, too!)

Hey! If you're participating in Rough Draft Month in November, we want to get to know you. Download and edit one of these transparent author frame templates to tell us about yourself and your project. Make sure to tag @roughdraftmonth and use #RDMO24 when you do ✨

Participating in Rough Draft Month but not as a writer? "Meet the Participant" versions are under the cut.

Hey, Rough Drafters!

This is for all the outline fans out there. Here are some tips on different outline structures that might help you while you blueprint your Rough Draft! I hope there is something helpful here whether you are new to outlining or a veteran. This is not a comprehensive list. I totally recommend digging into other narrative structures, seeing how they tick, and deciding what works for you!

✏️ The Hero’s Journey • Created by Joseph Campbell (using the simplified terms from Christopher Vogler)

The Hero’s journey is the backbone of most outline structures. The only difficult thing is a lot of these terms are still derived from classic mythic structure and are less applicable today. However, since it has been so well dissected and discussed, there are so many resources to help transpose the terms to narratives that involve less sword-and-shield-heroism. It might take a little time to understand each beat and what it can mean for you and your story, but this is such a well loved structure and will give your story some solid backbone! This structure is best suited for an adventure story where characters travel from one place to another, but you can get creative about what that adventure or journey looks like. At its most basic, though, the hero’s journey will help take your characters on quests in a far off place—whether it’s in the stars, across the continent, or in a world of your own making.

⭐ Great media examples of ‘journey’ narratives are: Star Wars (pick one really), Little Miss Sunshine, Lord of the Rings, and Life of Pi.

✏️ Save the Cat • Created by Blake Snyder

Save the Cat was originally intended for screenwriting. Its best application is in scripting, whether that be screenwriting, plays, games, or comics. The first and last beats help to set a tone for your story, which is crucial for script writing and opening/ending shots in films, but this concept can be just as important in prose. Consider using guidelines from this structure to plan your first and last scenes before you get to November.

⭐ You will recognize Save the Cat in most films, and you can find beat sheets to match films for example on the Save the Cat website.

✏️ Six Stage Outline by Michael Hauge

This structure is great to keep simple with bullet points or expand for more depth. In this outline there are only 11 beats—6 stages and 5 turning points. Turning points are the highest moment of external conflict. Ideally, internal and external conflict escalate at each turning point. Identity deals with character’s misbeliefs about themselves as the narrative drives them to be their most authentic self. This outline focuses on developing both internal and external struggles. If your story is particularly character-driven, this structure might be the one for you.

⭐ Many stories follow this structure but the one I was taught off of is the greatest movie of all time. Shrek.

Try drawing your arc with notes out on paper. This arc can silly: include dead ends, drop offs, spirals, tangles, anything! This helps visualize the ups and downs of the narrative. Also great to do after you’ve completed outlining for a visual aid.

Sometimes... one outline model is not enough! Mix and match your favorite terms and structures in the manner you feel best assists your narrative structure. Don’t be afraid to make it your own!

Read in your medium (novels, scripts, poems, etc.) and notate pages and scenes where the major beats happen. This really helps engage your brain and makes you more familiar with plot structure!

My favorite method to outline is the MLA outline structure. Using a template like this helps me put all of my ideas into place. I don’t have an excuse for not knowing what to do. This helps lock me in!

✏️ Uh oh, Secret Plantser Agenda!

If outlining the ending first doesn’t work for you, outline everything EXCEPT the ending! Leave something for you to discover once you get there!

Sometimes you need to take a step back. Maybe don’t make a 10 page outline. Maybe make 10 bullet points. Outline as much or as little as you need to.

Occasionally overplanning can cause me to lose the joy in my writing! Make sure to really experiment to find what works best with you and your style! Sometimes that means... making a less in-depth outline. This is a call out post for me (Sarah with an ‘h’) specifically.

✏️ Technically, I like to combine elements of all three of these plot structures, but Michael Hauge’s 6 stage outline is my favorite. It’s a very good structure for adjusting to your outlining style, whether you want to do just the bare bones plot points, or you want to use them as the waypoints as you plot out scene by scene. I like to use the stages and turning points as the headings and subheadings to my outline. I hope these tips are able to help you in your outlining journey, both planner and plantser alike. If you know of any other helpful tips for outlining, please share them with us!

Thanks for tuning in, happy drafting!

From the very beginning, our main goal has been to make Rough Draft the most inclusive and encouraging community that it can be. Something that all three of the admins didn’t like about other month-long writing challenges was the prescriptiveness of the goals. Usually, writing challenges have one set goal that everyone is meant to try for. And, regardless of how much participants are encouraged to set their own goals or write without worrying about the finish line, there is still an underlying feeling like participating without “winning” isn’t worth the trouble.

This is why we chose to outline our goals the way that we did. Writing challenges like this don’t need to be competitive or exclusive, because that defeats the purpose. Creation is creation is creation, and any amount of progress toward a goal should be celebrated. What I love about writing challenges isn’t just the struggle toward the finish line—it’s the community, the encouragement, and the act of creating. Having flexible goals puts these aspects back into focus.

Our four paths are 30,000 words, 50,000 words, 60,000 words, and a flex goal. The flex goal is built so that you can choose your own word count goal, but it’s also built to be used for creative projects that aren’t novels. For example, we have participants that are poets with the goal of writing a poem a day. We also have game devs that are using the flex goal to quantify writing as well as coding and planning. Maybe your only goal is to write every day regardless of the word count or to finish a panel of a comic every three days. We’d love to see the flex goal used in creative ways.

Also, the art we created to represent the four goals was inspired by the online flash games of the early aughts because we wanted to capture the fun of exploring a new world with no consequences. Creating is challenging—it can be difficult—but it should also be fun.

Have you chosen a goal? Make sure to join your trail’s leaderboard on Trackbear with the codes below.

🗻 Mountain (60,000 words): 74d0d9e9-95bd-4845-9d72-6f94f22ad3cd

🌳 Forest (50,000 words): 5469a86e-198c-495f-9079-79e9200194ba

🌊 Waterfall (30,000 words): 190f5737-4801-42e0-a265-f3abafaa764b

Wanna show it off? Below the cut, you'll find a bunch of downloadable assets like the one above that you can use for profile pictures and social media posts to show off your participation! Spread the word <3 (And be sure to tag us @roughdraftmonth and use #RDMO24 so we can see you!!)