The Writer's Bucket List

by Nancy Sackheim

A neighbor in his late 80’s recently asked me what I have on my bucket list and, before I could craft an answer, proceeded to tell me what he’d already checked off on his extensive list before relaying his plans for the next three adventures. He was adamant that everyone should have a bucket list.

Does everyone need a bucket list? Do writers need a bucket list? When “writers bucket list” is entered in the Google search box, in just over half a second more than eight million results pop up. Enter “writer’s bucket list” and a modest 809,000 results are returned.

The independent publishing platform, Bubok, in their The Perfect Writer’s Bucket List makes “getting enough sleep for an entire week straight” number one. Not as counterintuitive and possibly counterproductive as “Start a literary feud,” 98th on Bookfox’s 100 Bucket List Ideas for Writers.

Shayla Raquel categorizes her Writerly Bucket List into mini-buckets titled Travel, Personal Development, Experience, Bookish Buys, Literary Eats, and Write on.

Former Senior Online Editor of Writer’s Digest Brian A. Klems begins his Five Things That Should Be On Every Writer’s Bucket List with “Do something bizarre just to write about it” and ends with “Live poor for a few months (or years).” Number five is likely one of the easier items for many writers to check off.

Teralyn Childs categorizes her Writers Bucket List into “a list of all the different types of stories one could write, including everything from length and genre to point of view and non-literary media.”

Even Pinterest gets on the bucket list bandwagon with pics of lists, along with lots of sort of writers bucket list images.

As for me, I don’t have a bucket yet, much less a list to put in it.

.

Photo by Jeff Kingma on Unsplash