The One Chapter Project

 The One Chapter Project

In the summer of 2022, I was gifted a laptop on my birthday for the intention of learning how to code. I bought a collection of books on the subject, was working through an online course, and had full intention of that to become my career. Then the AI came. 

I saw right aways that learning how to code in this economy might not be the strongest pull towards a meaningful career- especially not as someone who was into their twenties and wasn't gifted in mathematics or computer science to begin with. It was a pipe dream, and the smoke vanished in the wind. So I took up a job at an insurance agency, and called it good. 

The laptop sat on my dresser for a few months and the silver finish greyed with dust. 

I used to paint in my old apartment. There were linoleum floors and lots of room to spread out in. Pictures of skulls and faces and landscapes hung around my bedroom and living room. Since I'd moved to a different apartment, I didn't have space to paint. Everything was carpeted, and I shared the place with two other guys who took up just as much space as I did. My creative urge was suppressed, and the paintings grew stale in an obtuse pile in my closet. 

That laptop stared me down from my dresser one day, below my television and above some dirty laundry. There had to be something I could do with the laptop other than coding. I mulled around on the screensaver for a while, then stumbled into the Microsoft suite. MS Word screamed at me through the blue light. What about writing? I'm a creative person, I enjoyed writing in school, and I enjoyed imagining fictional worlds, full of fictional people and wild events. So why not write? Something outside my own day-to-day sounded appealing. 

I stayed up that evening, and I wrote about two-thousand words in a story about a guy at a house party who finds out something bad happens. Looking at the document today, I can't interpret what 'bad' happened because I never wrote that part. Frankly, I doubt I knew what the bad thing would be when I was writing it. The dialogue is choppy and it reads quite poorly. 

At the time, I remember thinking it was really good. That chapter, titled "The Hint WIP," is the kickstarter for my writing as a hobby, and hopefully one day as a career.

As someone who's struggled in the past with completing works of art, using a computer to write is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it's basically free to use, you don't have to buy more supplies, and you can edit away at anything at any time for any reason. You can do this on the couch, in bed, on the train, or wherever you can hold it. Painting's a little more high-stakes because of the tangible objects required to paint. On a computer, your canvas is infinite. There are no messes to make. 

With infinite canvas comes infinite drafts, and infinite drafts feel like wasted time. I wasted plenty of time over a few months, into 2023. It didn't feel like a waste, but I thought they'd never see the light of day.

Skip ahead about a year, work at the insurance place has gotten really busy, and I'm broke as all get out. I'm working two jobs, going out with friends when I can, and managing a relationship. The time for writing fell between the cracks, and I fell out of the loop for a while. I lost touch completely with my creative side, and I was unknowingly depressed about it. I stayed like this for a while. 

A friend of mine invited me over for an afternoon at some point at the beginning of 2025 to talk about a video series he wanted to make. He wanted help plotting out a story for the whole thing, and we stayed up and brainstormed for hours about the plot. What was going to be a few cinematic instagram reels turned into an entire story with twists and turns that fit better in a movie or a television show. At the end of the night, we deemed it 'too ambitious' and we put it aside. 

Flash forwards to June of this year. I'd been writing more heavily, with large chunks of works completed and sitting on my computer. Each of them around twenty to thirty pages of good stuff, but the spark to finish them dwindled each time I thought of something new. 

I looked over all of my documents and at the time had a total of two-hundred pages of drafts and works, all unrelated to each other. Dozens of first chapters a collection of scenes, a few short stories and fewer full Part 1's of books. All of those documents I'd spent writing and was proud of, yet none of them were ready in any way to see the light of day. 

But why not? I'm not a particularly shy writer, and I like when people read my work, so why shouldn't any of it see the light of day? After looking over my documents, I decided I needed to write a book and finish it before the year's end.

On June 17th, 2025, I opened a blank page and wrote the introduction scene for the project my friend and I had plotted out. By the end of it, I wanted to keep going. 

There's a thing called writers block. The inability to continue forward in writing. I think it's a load of shit. Truly, I do. I think there's a mental block, which is the writer getting in their own way, but to put the blame on some temporary disability takes the onus out of the writer. Here's the solution, at least for me. 

Fucking write. 

If you're stuck on a scene, stop, change the scene, and write something else related. If you can't find an idea for a short story, write something random that doesn't matter and eventually it will come to you. Can't figure out some dialogue? Make it up. Who cares if it's crap. Write it down!

Unless your fingers are broken or you've been rendered brain dead, there is no such thing as writer's block. There is the feeling of being stumped, but the solution is to keep moving in some related direction- or a different direction! 

Sometimes an idea latches onto the forefront of your mind and you fight it to go away. Why not flesh it out as a break from what you're doing, just to satisfy the urge. Isn't writing a means of satisfying an urge? A way to bring out the fiction in your own life?

Write it down, make it exist. Then worry about it being good. Chances are, you and I aren't any good anyways. Forget the urge to make it good, the urge is to make it. Take it one Chapter at a time. 

The One Chapter Project is a place where writers can share and read chapters that just didn't make it out of the drafts, or chapters that they're proud of. If you've got something you want to share, send it, and we'll get posted. 

The space is a judgement free zone where anything goes. If you're a 'shy writer,' we encourage you to post with your real name to help boost your personal morale, but a pen name is perfectly fine as well.

Our blog goes live right now, but in the future we expect to be in a website format. 

For now, share the link, spread the word, and read some good stuff! 

More to come soon, 

C. A. Winter