RIYADH: What would happen if you wrote every day for 100 days? In Riyadh, a growing Arabic writing community has taken on the challenge, inviting writers of all levels to rediscover the joy of writing one day at a time.

The “100 Days of Writing” initiative offers a space for reflection, consistency and expression, far from the pressures of social media.

“Writing is an essential tool for anyone who wants to think,” Mohammad Aldhabaa, founder of the community, told Arab news.

He said that writing can serve as a form of meditation and healing, helping individuals process emotions and better understand themselves.

“There are many things you can do with writing on a personal level, to reflect, to deconstruct identity, and to make sense of experiences, he said. 

There are many things you can do with writing on a personal level, to reflect, to deconstruct identity, and to make sense of experiences.

Mohammad Aldhabaa, Kitabah founder

While the community grew, Aldhabaa saw firsthand the challenges Arab writers face online: “We don’t have the infrastructure to allow writers in Arabic to write and publish their work and to reach their audience using modern digital tools,” Aldhabaa explained.

Many writers are forced to rely on fragmented, English-oriented services like newsletter platforms and generic website builders. It is hard to expect consistent, high-quality content in Arabic without a proper system that incentivizes writers, he said.

Out of this need for better infrastructure, the community built its own solution: Kitabah, a publishing platform designed specifically for Arabic writers.

The platform allows users to publish work, create personal websites, and in future phases, monetize their writing. 

Kitabah integrates social features to help writers grow their audience without having to independently market their work, similar to Substack or Medium which are useful for writers working in English.

“We didn’t want to create separated islands where each writer builds a blog and struggles to bring in traffic,” Aldhabaa said. “Everything is distributed through the Kitabah feed, and also you have your own website.”

He explained that writers can publish, connect their work to a newsletter, and link their personal site across social media. “There’s a traffic engine behind it, so writers don’t have to do all the heavy lifting.”

Initiatives like this can help shape the Kingdom’s literary and cultural landscape, he said, by empowering more writers to tell locally rooted stories.

“That is very important and crucial, playing into the soft power of Saudi Arabia the ability to have way more writers and creators be able to focus on telling stories about the communities we grew up in, the stories we come from. Because there is something that is very valuable and has very impactful results,” he said.

The community attracts experienced writers and absolute beginners. “We don’t want it to be only seasoned writers who already have a certain level of achievement because the idea of the community is to allow people to try and to learn, and not to create a status-based community.”

Hanen Shahin, a member of the community, said: “The writing community is an alternative environment to the forums we used to write in years ago. Social media came along and made it a competitive space driven by numbers and algorithms, an unhealthy environment for emerging writers, and sometimes even a damaging one.”

Shahin said that writing communities, by contrast, offer the guidance and perspective many writers need.

“You’re not just writing consistently but doing so while receiving feedback from people with refined taste and diverse backgrounds, which gives you a broader view of your work.”

Lana Elsafadi, another member, said: “Writing has helped me know myself better and get better at sorting out my feelings clearly. I feel really good when I can make a helpful comment that shows a deep idea or gives good advice, whether it’s about personal things or work.”

One hundred days may seem a big challenge, but for many writers in Riyadh, it is just the beginning.