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. One room, and you in it.
Two ways to run it
Run it in November.
Day-one is November 1, the month a lot of writers still keep for this. If friends are doing it too, you are all on day 7 together. Closes on the 30th.
Run it on your clock.
It’s March and you don’t want to wait? Start The Push today. Your day-one is the day you start; the 30-day clock is yours. Same target, same shape, 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. 30K is a real month. So is 20K.
- 03Write in 25-minute sprints in the Room with mute mode on. Two or three a day gets you there.
- 04On day 30, check the word count in the Room and export the draft. That is the finish line. No screenshots required.
What you get for finishing
The reward is 50,000 words that did not exist a month ago. Export them, print them, put them in a drawer for a fortnight. No badges, no profile marks: the draft is the prize.
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.
- 03The words are yours. Nothing here drafts them, summarises them, or finishes them for you.
- 04No sign-up, no emails, no tracking pixels. Nothing to turn off.
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 write in sprints. 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.