My goal is to bring you daily prompts that will focus your creative time and energy on one (more) specific area per day to make conlanging more approachable and less overwhelming, whether this is your first conlang project or your twentieth.
Every day, I will post a new prompt for an activity to complete. If you complete these daily prompts as the year progresses, you will create a working language this year and document its features. If you start this Conlang Year journey on January 1 and follow along each day, you will be prepared to participate in Lexember at the end of the year. (The final month of prompts is reserved for vocabulary expansion and, thus, Lexember participation.) Started by Mia DeSanzo and Pete Bleackley, Lexember is a conlang community-wide social media event, where conlangers share a new word in one (or more!) of their conlangs every day during the month of December.*
As you work through the daily prompts, you may find that you did more than was strictly required for a prompt, thus landing you in a situation where you completed the next day’s prompt before reaching it. You could, of course, use the next day as a rest day since you’ve already completed the prompt. However, you could also use that “found time” to expand the system in focus or, depending on where you are in the year, spend the day reviewing notes, updating entries, creating new vocabulary, or exploring features of other languages to get inspiration for your own project. There is always something you can do to support the process!
Every prompt is assigned one of four work areas in focus:
- Learn/Brainstorm/Try
- Organize/Plan/Structure
- Create/Make/List
- Solidify/Write/Share
These types of prompts are often found in the order presented here. You will find that prompts within a topic or specific area often begin with time devoted to researching options or brainstorming ideas before you move on to a stage of organizing and planning your next steps. From there, you will move into days of creating, whether you are crafting structures for your language or new vocabulary. Finally, you will solidify your work in a language document (or documents) in a way that will allow you to share your work with others, should you choose to share it.
There are no requirements to share your work (this is your own journey, after all!), but I do encourage anyone willing to share their work to do so. Sharing work is a community-building practice—you never know who you might inspire by sharing what you’ve created. If you do choose to share it, you can add the tag #conlangyear to make posts more findable by others!
*You can find past Lexember entries by searching for the hashtag Lexember on social media sites like Instagram and Tumblr. Anywhere you can find conlangers on social media, you’re bound to find Lexember entries!