Weekly Writing Challenge: A Splash of Color

No matter how long you’ve been blogging, there is always more to learn. As part of the Weekly Writing Challenges, once a month, we’ll be highlighting a feature in the WordPress.com Dashboard and challenging you to incorporate it into your blog. We want to help you take full advantage of all the tools available on WordPress.com to make your blog the best it can be  — and to make your friends jealous of your web wizardry. 

To participate, tag your posts with “DPchallenge” or leave a link to your post in the comments. Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight the week’s best posts on Freshly Pressed each Friday.

---

I’ve got colors on my mind. Here on the East Coast, the leaves are starting to change from verdant green to a cozy, deep orange as Fall kicks into gear. I’m also particularly excited about the new Custom Colors preview function that WordPress.com announced on our blog last week. Custom Colors is a new part of the Custom Design upgrade that gives gorgeous color palate suggestions as you customize the look of your site. Now, it’s available in preview mode so you can get a taste of all the beautiful color options prior to getting the upgrade.

Yet, as much as I love this new tool, you don’t need an upgrade to appreciate color — in fact, you can do that any time, and that’s just what we’re going to ask you to do. For this Weekly Writing Challenge, we’d like to see you incorporate a splash of color into your posts. Need a few ideas to get started?

• Write a post inspired by a color: Titling a post “Blue” is likely to trigger some immediate emotions in your readers. They will expect the post to be about something sad or sorrowful, or maybe even related to a wedding (“Something borrowed, something blue”). The point is, colors trigger specific feelings and connotations. Take a color and use the feeling it evokes as a jumping off point for your story and see where it takes you.
• Highlight color in a story or event: Good storytelling is in the details. Tell us a tale with a particular focus on your surroundings, using vivid and colorful language. At your family picnic last year, were the trees just green or were they just a vibrant green color that they almost seemed to glow like neon?
• Insert color into your posts: Are you a painter, an artist, a handyperson, or into DIY projects? How about literally inserting a splash of color into your posts through photos, describing how the colors make you feel or the story behind your series.

Want to see what other bloggers have to say around WordPress.com?

• Fall is Here, lea dejarlais photography
• New Landscapes: Fall in Season, newdigitalscapes
• Impromptu Nature Hike, Walking Among the Trees
• Impermanence, betterthansurviving

Before we sign off and you get to writin’, we wanted to let you know how much we loved reading your responses to last week’s challenge! You really ran with it and published some wonderfully creative posts. Not only that, but many of you commented or posted about how stepping outside of your comfort zone was a liberating and inspirational experience that will positively impact your blogging. Thank you for sharing with us — we’re so glad you’re part of the Daily Post!