For the better part of two decades, every November had a name. After 2024 it didn’t. The Push is our standing 50K — the spiritual successor for folk who used to do that other thing, and for anyone who’s never had a deadline before.
Fifty thousand words. Thirty days. A room full of folk doing the same absurd thing.
Two ways to run it
Run it with everyone.
Day-one is November 1. You’re on day 7 when everyone else is on day 7. Sprints get busy, the forum lights up, regional rooms hold their biggest meetups of the year. Closes on the 30th.
Run it on your clock.
Joined in March and don’t want to wait? Start The Push solo. Your day-one is the day you start; the 30-day clock is yours. Same target, same badge, same forum threads — just on your own pacing.
The shape (either way)
- 01Target: 50,000 words of new draft in 30 days.
- 02Set a personal target if 50K isn’t the right number — every account does this in their dashboard.
- 03Three daily writing sprints across time zones (07:00 / 14:00 / 22:00 UTC). Members can host their own.
- 04Submit your final word count to the Push forum on day 30 to be recognised. No screenshots required.
What you get for finishing
The 50,000 Words badge for the season. A pinned closeout thread for the year. A small mark on your profile that only members ever see. If you finish three Pushes in a row, the mark gets a small star — visible only to other folk who’ve done the same.
What we don’t do
- 01No leaderboard. No public ranking. No “X people finished, you didn’t.”
- 02No streak shame. Skipped a day? Skip three. Come back when you can.
- 03No AI co-writers, no “your story so far” LLM summaries, no autocomplete-the-paragraph.
- 04No tracking pixels in the email reminders. (You can turn those off entirely.)
If you’ve never tried this
50K is roughly 1,667 words a day — about an hour of writing if you don’t edit as you go. Less if you sprint with other folk. More if you treat every sentence like it has to be the one. Most folk who finish do so by lowering the bar on first-draft quality and raising it again in editing months that come later.
The point is the doing, not the volume. If you write 12,000 words and finally put a name to your protagonist, that’s the win.
The Push you got the bones down is worth more than the Push you finished the polish.