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The importance of developing a writer’s mission statement.
Just a few thoughts on why you should develop a mission statement to guide you through your writing life.
This is an edited excerpt from my September 2022 newsletter, The Writing Life.
You can also listen to it on my Living the Writing Life podcast.
Do you have a mission statement for your writing life? I know I didn’t—at least, not one that I fully articulated, wrote down, and regularly reviewed.
Oh, I had goals—anyone who knows me knows that I am always setting goals. Big goals, little goals, goals for today, this month, this year.
But a mission statement? Not really. But I’ve come to realize that having a mission statement can be a useful tool, so I did some research on the topic. I found that most writers’ mission statements include three types of information:
- What we write—the type of writing we do
- Whom we write for—the audience we want to reach
- Why we write—the emotion that writing generates and the outcome we hope to achieve through our work.
Why do we need a mission statement? Because too often we get burned out. Or we are plagued by self-doubt. Or rejections make us wonder why we are tormenting ourselves when we could go out and do something less psychologically stressful like—well, like anything else but writing!
Having a mission statement helps us define who we are as writers: our author brand or identity, the types of stories we want to tell, and the overarching theme that runs through all our work.
It also reminds us of why we write, what writing does for us, how writing makes us feel—at least, on a good writing day!
And when our goals seem impossibly out of reach, the mission statement will serve as a guiding light that leads us through those dark days and nights.
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The post Thoughts on writing and life for September 2022 appeared first on The Writer's Place.