It wouldn’t be January if there wasn’t a surfeit of books, articles and blog posts about goals.
- Figuring out what your goals are—or should be
- Figuring out how you’re going to achieve them
- Figuring out how you’re going to handle all distractions, disturbances and disasters that seek to undermine your plans and deflect you from your strategy
And I’ll confess that I’m right up there with the rest of them. I religiously set goals every January 1, and talk about goal-setting at the January meeting of my Monday Night Writers group.
Goals are important. They are a way to define what matters to us, where we think we could improve and who we want become during the next 12-month time period.
For some writers, that might be achieving the “six-figure” status touted about in so many books and articles. I did a quick search on Google for “six-figure” and “writing” and got well over 800,000 results, indicating that there are a lot of people out there ready to tell you how to achieve that elusive goal.
And it can be, and has been, done (although admittedly not by yours truly) if you focus all your time and energies into your writing career. As Mridu Khullar Relph wrote in her post, Six-Figure Freelancing: The 2014 Challenge, “I work 40 hours a week at the moment and working 20 hours a week at $100 an hour (my current rate) means that I can make $100,000 a year. The challenge, of course, is to fill those 20 hours each and every week with paying work but if I can manage to do that then I still have 20 hours a week left to play with.”
And that is the challenge (whether you want to be a six-figure or a five-figure or an anything-at-this-point-figure writer): finding the work to fill the till.
But what if your writing goal isn’t money-oriented? Perhaps it’s less currency-defined: finishing (or even starting!) your novel or some other major writing project. Or pulling up your big writer pants and sending out what is finished to editors or agents or publishers. Or learning about marketing—and then putting what you learned into practice. (And do I really have to tell you how important marketing is to a writer?)
You still need to define what you want to achieve and develop a strategy for getting from Point A to Point Z.
Goal-Setting SMARTs
Goals have to be SMART—or, as Cathy Yardley put it in How to Set Goals as a Fiction Writer:
- Specific: you not only know what you want, you know what it’ll take to get there.
- Measurable: It’s really clear when you’ve achieved it.
- Attainable: it’s under your control
- Realistic: you can actually achieve it in the time frame you set, without killing yourself.
- Timely: you set a time frame for when the thing’s going to happen… otherwise it’s always “in the future.”
And obviously, once you have a SMART goal, you need to stop talking and start doing—and make sure everything you do makes sense in terms of your major writing goal, even if reaching that goal will take a lot of time and a lot of effort.
In her post, Moving Beyond Deadlines to Accomplish Your Big Writing Goals, Laura Vanderkam wrote: “productivity isn’t just about getting things done. It’s about making progress toward big goals that matter to you. In the thick of daily to-dos, you need to make space for the speculative long term projects — the must-read articles, the books — that will make your career.”
Of course, this presupposes that you have defined your writing career: what you envision as your writing identity. You might do all kinds of writing, but what is your primary focus? How do you think of yourself as a writer?
In my case, my “work writing” (the writing that pays the bills) is a mix of corporate and magazine work, covering everything from health to manufacturing. I enjoy the work, many times find the topics fascinating, and take a lot of pride in delivering pieces that meet if not exceed my client’s or editor’s expectations.
But if you asked me what my writer identity is—how I define myself—I would say I am a fiction writer. It may be the area in which I spend the least amount of clockable time and may have, so far, translated into the teeniest portion of my income, but it’s what matters most to me.
When my fiction collection, TRAVELING LEFT OF CENTER AND OTHER STORIES, came out last September, I was more thrilled than if I had reached six-figure status. And each time one of my short stories is published (“When Ann calls” on Wild Violet being the most recent), my belief in myself as a fiction writer is reaffirmed.
Flexibility is the key
So, that being the case, when I set my goals for 2015, I had to make sure that fiction was on the list, and then develop a plan to build on what success I have achieved in that area. And that brings up another aspect of goal-setting: your schedule for achieving your goal has to be flexible. Otherwise, when life throws you a curve ball, your set-in-stone strategy will crack under the pressure.
When I wrote my first (and, as yet-yet, unpublished) novel, I did it in 30-minute-a-day increments. Each morning, I wrote for half an hour until, in a little over three months, the first draft was done. And at the time, I was living alone and could pull it off.
But as they say, that was then and this is now. Since my 92-year-old father moved in with me (my decision and my privilege, I’d like to add), there are many more demands on my time than there were way back when.
So I have reined in my fiction-focused goals, since my priorities have had to shift more than a bit and my schedule is a little tighter.
Rather than assign a specific time of day to a certain task—like writing fiction every morning—I am taking a broader, more flexible approach: some writing of new short stories, some editing of drafted short stories, some submitting to publications—maybe not every day but at least every week.
The projects that take a larger chunk of time—editing the novels that are in first-draft stage, working on my second short fiction collection and researching agents and publishers—I set aside for when caregivers are here.
Will it slow down my forward progress? Of course. But it’s better than throwing up my hands and saying “There’s no way I can do it now!”
So if your life, like mine, is already full-to-the-brim with responsibilities, then settle for undertaking at least one task each day that is related to one of your writing goals. Track it, build on it, and by the end of the year, you will either have moved closer to achieving your goal or refined it to better fit who you are as a writer.
Tracking your progress
Speaking of tracking, there’s a free tool available at Moira Allen’s Writing World website. A Writer’s Year is a 365-day planner available in PDF and Excel formats. Allen also offers both a free PDF and Excel Submission Tracker. (Want a print version? Order the perfect-bound format from CreateSpace and Amazon for $10.95 or the Spiral-bound from Lulu.com at $12.95.)
Share your thoughts!
I’d love to hear what goals you’ve set for 2015 and what your strategies are for achieving them. Please share your comments here!