#rbchallenge
The Ray Bradbury Challenge
Table of Contents:
- On the Star System
- On Makeups and Writing
- On Curation
- Some Initial Observations
- Analytics and Readings
Note: As of 03/30/26, I have discontinued this challenge. I know, but I made it a good five weeks. I don’t think I’m obligated to give a reason for this, but i’ll say that while this challenge was really insightful and truthfully I will probably still keep reading an essay, short story, and poem some days, I needed to reorient a lot of my personal obligations to stay truthful to myself. Basically, I hope to keep reading and writing without having to fill out a daily list to make sure I’m doing it.
“I’ll give you a program to follow every night, a very simple program…one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them…But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?” — Ray Bradbury
Beginning on February 15th, 2026, I am going to participate in the Ray Bradbury Challenge. In marriage of the spirit of the original challenge with a practical undertaking, I have defined the rules as follows:
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I am only going to engage in the challenge for 365 days, a full year.
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I am going to write one short story weekly, culminating in 52 short stories by the end of it.
Below you will find some considerations on the challenge itself. You might find this interesting if you’re interested in my experience of the challenge, or if you want to undertake it yourself. If you would like to skip to the analytics and list of readings/writings, you can find this here, or at the bottom of the page.
On the Star System:
For some readings, I will assign them a star (*). There is no precise criteria for determining what is worthy of a star. If I do not like a piece of writing, or if it delivers no special impact, then it gets no star. If it brings me emotion, or I find it important, then it gets a star.
After four weeks now, I have starred many pieces of writing. And within this growing corpus of starred readings I have found a need to designate pieces with even greater importance. A question then forms: How to assign stars? The star system itself is a way of discriminating good writing from worse writing, and so it makes sense that with an ever-growing body of good writing, there ought to emerge better and better writing. But I have a few considerations:
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I want to assign stars organically without particular thought given to their distribution. The distribution of stars should not itself affect my consideration of what is worth a star. Imagine that I read a poem which brought me to tears. I go to assign it a star, but find under the guidelines that I’d already hit my quota of 15% single starred readings. This simply wouldn’t do. If it is important, it is important. Simple ‘as.
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That being said, I would hope that through natural assignment, the proportions of readings with ever-greater amounts of stars should emerge semi logarithmically. Meaning that within, perhaps, a body of 100 works, maybe 20 of them have one stars, three might have two stars, and scarcely any have more stars. Additionally, It wouldn’t make much sense for all my writing to be three starred. This is not to say it couldn’t happen, but it is unlikely. More importantly, it would simply feel wrong; this is a system primarily based on feeling, from which insight ought to be derived emergently.
My solution: Further stars can only be assigned upon rereading or in retrospect. A piece cannot earn multiple stars immediately, its importance must be assigned over time through the trial of actually being remembered. A one star writing might be immediately important. But a two star writing might be one I find resurfacing over weeks or months. A three star or even four star writing—if existing within the sizeable corpus of my reading—must be especially important, being essentially influential to my being or some piece of creation.
On Makeups and Writing
If I find myself missing my reading, I have decided to make up the reading as soon as possible at a double pace, meaning that when I read my next daily essay, story, and poem, I will read one more of each, and assign this reading to the soonest possible day.
I think this is a good solution. It is only natural that I will miss a reading now and again, and I have no desire to quit the challenge on day 345 because I forgot to read an essay. Additionally, reading only at a double pace ensures that each piece is given its proper digestion, as opposed to reading 15 pieces a day after missing a week. Of course, in general this challenge is intended to benefit myself as a writer, so some effort must be given. If I miss a reading or writing due to life, so be it. But if I miss a month, I ought to question if I am really determined to do this challenge properly.
On writing especially, I make no guarantee that my work will be finished. I hope by the end to have produced some stories of quality, but I think I will do better to write with my best effort per week and to post simply what I have.
Lastly, if I make up a missed reading, I will give no expressed indication of doing so. I hold myself to no obligation of absolute efficiency. If I make up a week, I will fill it in as if I read consistently when the reading is done. The list below is for convenience, it’s not a git log.
On Curation
One thing you might be wondering: How will I find the stories, essays, and poems? So far, my sources vary. At the start, I found myself rereading from my past, such as the various works of King, Orwell, Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Shirley jackson, and Gary Soto, to name a few. You might find these within the curriculum of a regular english class, and many of these I found nostalgic. I would make obvious searches into google such as “Good Essays, Poems, Short Stories”, and pick what I found interesting. Consulting internet communities is helpful as well. On reddit for example, people comment in earnest on writings important to them, which helped me find texts I actually wanted to read.
Some particularly good repositories of writing (non exhaustive):
- A blog by Danielle Krage, who completed this challenge for 1000 days! And dutifully documented his readings over the entire course.
- Paul Graham’s website, which has some good essays.
- A good repository on Orwell
- A great variety of essays
- Poetry Foundation
Perhaps controversially, I have also made use of AI recommendations to curate readings. I am hesitant to recommend this as a general method of finding readings, since it takes the act of curation entirely out of your hands. If you ask an LLM such as ChatGPT or Gemini to provide you with a list of essays or short stories, you might find yourself reading general, overly popular, or not altogether insightful works. Whereas a careful curation by the individual can ensure exposure to more profound texts. For example, I think there is a great wonder to reading a short essay from the 1800s on umbrellas, or an essay on spiders and wasps, as opposed to the 100th David Foster Wallace or Joan Didion essay. That being said, I cannot deny the great utility of this tool when used with consideration. As of 03/15/26, I have found that the Claude AI by anthropic (used without payment) to be the most insightful in returning works that I would want to read. Chat GPT and Gemini tend to recommend regular and popular works, and in some cases even hallucinate whole essays and stories. A common prompt I have used:
provide me a collection of essays, short stories, and poems, that are good and from a variety of subjects, but not apart of the popular canon that you would regularly recommend. Also on the shorter side preferably
I prefer to read shorter works, such as ones between 3-10 pages, but there is great stuff to be found in longer ranges. Just keep in mind that the effort required to properly finish Emerson’s Self Reliance is going to be far different than what’s required for Orwell’s Thoughts on the common toad. So be mindful of the quantity as well as quality of your daily reading—you have a lot of time ahead of you.
Finally, some of these works are not readily available on the internet at a first click. Some can be found only within essay or story collections, within wikipedia links, or on school websites. I will not go into my methods of scavenging works, but anyone with half a mind for internet research will do alright, just know that following in my footsteps might present you with trouble in procuring some of the more esoteric pieces. For this reason, I do not make any signficiant attempt to save what I read. If I find a passage particularly notable, the closest thing to annotation I’ll do is to copy it into my daily note for the day with a simply citation to the author and the work.
Some Initial Observations
I will likely write later on about how this challenge has affected me, but at one day shy of four weeks in, here are a few of my thoughts:
- In general, this program is a God-send for any aspiring writer who is seriously motivated to improve their writing ability and overall literacy. Before starting, I found the challenge to be daunting. How could I read so much and for so long? In talking it over with others, they produced similar sentiments of disbelief that such a challenge could be sustained. But I now realize that this challenge—besides the consistency it demands—is not alltogether insurmountable, and actually parallels the regimens of athletes and students worldwide, whose habits most of us have no trouble in conceptualizing. This, it would seem, is simply the name of the game. And I think any serious writer ought to consider undertaking this challenge.
- Part of the benefits of this challenge come simply from the sheer exposure to writing that it offers. Beforehand, even though I would claim that I liked to write and read, I scarcely read at all besides what I found on social media or a book every so often. But when you read every day, you realize that your brain is capable of so much more. After a few weeks, your brain begins to adapt to the workload, and after a month, you find yourself forming deeper understandings of writing, vocabulary, structure, etc. It brings me back to some English classes in Highschool, where reading of this quantity was not alltogether seen as absurd. Put simply: This challenge shows you how capable you can really be. And under a certain reframing, it’s not alltogether that crazy now is it? Would you really consider someone a musician if they didn’t play their instrument more than once a week?
Analytics and Readings
Stories
- The Room
- Eternity, Eternity
- The Babelophone
- Incomplete
Readings
Star Distribution
| Rating | Count | % of Total (101) |
|---|---|---|
| ★★★ | 0 | 0% |
| ★★ | 4 | 3% |
| ★ | 28 | 27% |
Week 1
02/15/2026 — Sunday
Story: The Jaunt
Essay: Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Poem: In the Desert
02/16/2026 — Monday
Story: The Swimmer
Essay: The Death of the Moth
Poem: Design
02/17/2026 — Tuesday
Story: Hills Like White Elephants
Essay: Notes on Camp
Poem: Phenomenal Woman
02/18/2026 — Wednesday
Story: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Essay: On Self Respect
Poem: Ozymandias ★
02/19/2026 — Thursday
Story: The Veldt
Essay: Science and Religion, The Purpose of Religion, The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry
Poem: Oranges ★★
02/20/2026 — Friday
Story: A Hanging ★
Essay: The Crack-Up ★
Poem: Fire and Ice
02/21/2026 — Saturday
Story: Araby
Essay: Federer as Religious Experience
Poem: Harlem
02/22/2026 — Sunday
Story: The Monkey's Paw
Essay: Why I Write
Poem: Dulce et Decorum Est
Writing: The Room
Week 2
02/23/2026 — Monday
Story: The Hanging Stranger
Essay: Politics and the English Language ★
Poem: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night ★★
02/24/2026 — Tuesday
Story: Signs and Symbols
Essay: My Wood
Poem: The Ship of Death
02/25/2026 — Wednesday
Story: The Lottery Ticket
Essay: The Philosophy of Umbrellas
Poem: The Panther ★
02/26/2026 — Thursday
Story: In the Penal Colony
Essay: A Message to Garcia
Poem: The Fish
02/27/2026 — Friday
Story: The Necklace
Essay: Why Not Stay at Home?
Poem: [anyone lived in a pretty how town]
02/28/2026 — Saturday
Story: The Open Window ★
Essay: On Being Idle ★
Poem: Snow
03/01/2026 — Sunday
Story: Nine Billion Names of God
Essay: A Modest Proposal
Poem: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Writing: Eternity, Eternity
Week 3
03/02/2026 — Monday
Story: The Aged Mother
Essay: This is the Life ★
Poem: Dream Variations
03/03/2026 — Tuesday
Story: The Lottery ★
Essay: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences ★
Poem: Night Was Done
03/04/2026 — Wednesday
Story: The Gift of the Magi
Essay: Margaret Atwood at University of Toronto
Poem: We Real Cool
03/05/2026 — Thursday
Story: Harrison Bergeron
Essay: Shooting an Elephant
Poem: The Tyger ★
03/06/2026 — Friday
Story: The Egg ★
Essay: Self-Reliance
Poem: If— ★
03/07/2026 — Saturday
Story: Bullet in the Brain ★★
Essay: The Spider and the Wasp
Poem: Archaic Torso of Apollo ★
03/08/2026 — Sunday
Story: The Last Question ★
Essay: On Noise
Poem: The Best Thing in the World ★
Writing: The Babelophone
Week 4
03/09/2026 — Monday
Story: The Interlopers
Essay: Write Simply ★
Poem: The Orange
03/10/2026 — Tuesday
Story: Wants ★
Essay: Good Writing ★
Poem: The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me
03/11/2026 — Wednesday
Story: Indian Camp ★
Essay: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going to Miss Almost Everything ★
Poem: No Man Is an Island
03/12/2026 — Thursday
Story: The School ★
Essay: The Witness
Poem: The Two-Headed Calf
03/13/2026 — Friday
Story: The Portable Phonograph ★
Essay: The Pleasures of Eating
Poem: Desiderata ★
03/14/2026 — Saturday
Story: The Bet
Essay: The Brown Wasps
Poem: Well Water
03/15/2026 — Sunday
Story: The Ledge ★★
Essay: Joyas Voladoras
Poem: Tichborne's Elegy
Writing: Incomplete
Week 5
03/23/2026 — Monday
Story: An Angel in Disguise
Essay: How to Mark a Book ★
Poem: flocking.go ★
03/24/2026 — Tuesday
Story: I Could See the Smallest Things
Essay: On Transience
03/25/2026 — Wednesday
Story: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried
Essay: Letters To A Young Poet ★
Poem: Ode to My Socks
03/26/2026 — Thursday
Story: The Selfish Giant
Essay: Things could be better
Poem: This Is Just To Say
03/27/2026 — Friday
Story: The Father
Essay: You can do it, baby! ★
Poem: Nothing Gold Can Stay