2026 Get Started Right Writing Challenge: Day 3

Welcome to the third day of the 12-day Get Started Right Writing Challenge! There's still plenty of time to get caught up; find the first day's challenge here and the second day here.

For the third day, make a love/hate list. This is mentioned in Katie Bernet's recent article "I Quit Writing, and Then I Wrote My Debut Novel," which explains how she was able to reset her writing process after writing five manuscripts that didn't sell (even though they had agent representation). That's a definite low point, but then she shares this interesting nugget:

"The idea for my sixth manuscript, which would end up becoming my debut novel, Beth Is Dead, came from an exercise suggested by a fellow author. I asked her how to find a story that I really wanted—needed—to write, and she told me to create a love/hate list.

"Like a pro/con list, you divide the page in two. On the left, you make a list of all the things you love: books, movies, tropes, themes, life experiences. And on the right, you do the same for the things you hate. Then you take two things from your love list to create a story that will conquer the things on your hate list.

"I made a long list, and in the end two things jumped out at me: Little Women and mystery-thrillers. I never would have connected those two concepts without my love/hate list, but within minutes, I imagined a retelling of Little Women as a mystery-thriller that would conquer so many of the things on my hate list, like loneliness, stereotypes, and losing people too soon."

So let's spend at least 15 or 20 minutes making our own love/hate lists and see if any interesting threads emerge as a result.

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Things I love:

Poetry
Literary fiction
Mysteries (especially cozies)
Graphic novels
Wordplay
Emotion (not to be confused with abstraction)
Voice
Lasagna
Music (many genres and musicians)
Kurt Vonnegut
Running
Reading
Writing
Publishing
Anything with sugar in it
Walks in nature, especially dirt trails
Sudoku
Puzzles
Time alone
Time with good friends and family
History
Making connections (like connecting thoughts, not networking)

Things I hate:

Excessive violence and gore (without a purpose)
Cheating spouses
Plot without character development
Characters without a story
"Tom Sawyer," by Rush
L. Ron Hubbard novels
Bad drivers
Mushrooms and anything coconut-flavored
2001: A Space Odyssey (movie)
Anything with sugar in it
Small talk
Public speaking
Mean people
Inconsistencies
Being recognized for things (whether good or bad) in front of other people

(Note about my lists: You might've noticed that "Anything with sugar in it" was in both lists, so you could probably say that I have a love-hate relationship with sugary sweet things to eat. And that makes me think of Aaron Belz's fun poem "The Love-Hat Relationship," which is slightly different.)