Earlier this week, Aaron at Today is That Day issued a 90-day challenge, and for me, it’s come at an opportune time.

Aaron writes:

“Are you committed to making your dreams come true in the next 90 days?

No, I mean REALLY committed - as in “Failure is Not an Option” type of committed.

If you are, then you should be nodding enthusiastically at this point, ecstatic that your dreams are already a reality, and that the short amount of time between now and you meeting those dreams is nothing more than a logistical issue. You should know in your heart of hearts that you attaining your dreams in a very short amount of time is only a matter of working through some minor details.”

I found this to be a very good reminder that our dreams already ARE a reality.

The space of time that’s available within a 90 day period is a short space of time, and in many ways, rather breathtaking - we all have our big dreams, and taking that first big step of commitment can often be the hardest thing, but if it’s as easy to create castles as it is buttons, maybe it’s just a matter of not seeing it anymore as being the hard thing.

When I read about the 90 day challenge, I immediately thought about one of my biggest dreams. It’s one that requires inspired action, and yes, making that commitment. It’s not one of those dreams that I would ever figure I could sit down and simply visualize into reality - it’s one of those dreams that, by it’s very nature, requires action on my part.

I’m a writer, but my published work has been all non-fiction. Yet up until I had my children, I wrote stories all the time.

Until now, I’ve never completed a novel.

My problem has always been that I have a gazillion ideas and situations that I want to work with, and usually the beginnings of a cast of characters to go with these ideas and situations … but I can never see far enough ahead to know where they are all headed.

And because of this, I have always felt like I couldn’t possibly sit down and write seriously about any of these ideas of mine - how could I, when I couldn’t come up with any sort of decent outline? It felt like not having a map to follow.

Recently, I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing again, and his words struck me even more forcefully this time. He writes that he has only plotted a few books in his entire writing career. He usually starts off with a situation, and part of the thrill of writing is discovering where everything is going.

He believes that his stories already exist, and that his task is to dig them out like fossils, as whole as he possibly can.

I’d read this the first time I picked up On Writing (an excellent book which I highly recommend), but for some reason, it never leaped out at me the way it did just recently. I find myself liking his analogy a lot, because it removes the biggest barrier that I’ve always faced when it comes to writing a novel: not knowing how the story will end.

Sitting down with an idea, and then just taking the tale whichever way it wants to go: this is the way I want to write.

Other nudges began drifting my way. My friend Holly sent me a quote from a New Yorker piece on Michael Ondaatjie and his new novel:

“Beginning with almost nothing but a few stray images, and then seeing where they led. A family that after it is shattered by an incident splits up, a wild horse in a barn. I do not have a plan in mind before I begin but I follow these small clues so the shaping and editing comes much later, after the story has been found and fulfilled, cuts it down, shapes it, tightens it makes sense of it.”

And then later she told me about watching Oprah interview the literary legend Cormac McCarthy, who also said he doesn’t know where a book is going as he writes it.

So for me, Aaron’s 90 day challenge feels like the final nudge. And so I’ve decided to commit to this big dream of mine, and create this castle. I’m going to write my first novel in the next 90 days.

If the idea of a 90 day challenge resonates with you - and I truly feel that things like this should be done only if the idea resonates with you in that particular moment - if it’s forced, it’s not fun, and without the fun and the passion and that general wonderful feeling, these types of self-challenges have a harder time working - then click over to Today is That Day and tell Aaron the big dream you’re going to commit to. He’s hoping to hear from you 90 days later, too. And you just might win a prize.