I volunteered recently to lead the writing group at our local library. This last week was the first time I’d been in the hot seat, so I took a handout with me. A single sheet of paper, with a few words printed on it, spaced to allow for writing after each timeframe:
- Tomorrow
- Next week
- Next Month
- One Year
- Five Years
- Lifetime
Everyone’s goals are going to look very different. Some writers are trying to build a career. Others are simply trying to get the worlds from their head onto the page. I can’t suggest goals to any one of the writers in our small group, or here, but I can say there are some things you can do to help reach those goals.
Firstly, you want to have goals. Not in your head, but on paper, concretely written down and preferably somewhere you can refer to them often. If you don’t have a goal, you can’t possibly reach it, any more than I could fly up and touch the aurora borealis.
Secondly, you need to understand that goals are mutable. Particularly the last three on my list are a bit pie-in-the-sky, as you don’t know what’s going to happen in a week, let alone a year. You can predict it to some extent, usually, but the unusual does happen. When it does, give yourself grace. Change up the goal. Scratch it out and write in a new one. Life happens, and you live through it until you come out on the other side of the storm into the sunshine again, ready to breathe deeply of the fresh air and start on it again. Because you don’t have to start from scratch. You were making progress. You just have to recalibrate and begin where you left off.
In order to reach those long-term goals, you need to break them down into smaller goals that you can see progress on daily, and weekly, because otherwise you’re spinning your wheels going nowhere. Like driving on ice, you’re headed for a crash. If you want to write a novel in a month, say, November… you have to decide how long you want your novel to be. If it’s going to be 60K words, which is a perfectly cromulent length for a tightly-paced action adventure where things happen, then you’ll need to be writing 2k words a day in that month, with a strong preference for writing 2500 words or more to build up a buffer against that one really bad day… or write 3K a day and take weekends off. Know yourself, and your capacity. Set aside writing time. Tell your family. You’re working on a big project, and you need a couple of hours a day where you will be uninterrupted. I did a novel in a month by writing on my lunch hour and after the children were in bed for an hour or two: it is possible. Not easy, but possible.
If you want to build a career? Well, that’s going to be a much more complex set of goals, because you’re going to have to learn sales, marketing, design, and much more. So for this, you likely want a calendar to write goals on. More than one calendar. And a lot more time!
Not every writer needs to be that in-depth. Some writers are happy with 200 words in a day, and they can’t write every day, and that is perfectly acceptable. It’s all about their goals. They may be hoping to write a novel in a lifetime, not because they plan to ever publish it, but just to get it out of their head and onto paper. Along the way, they enjoy the journey of wordcraft and worldbuilding. Every one of you is going to have a different set of goals, and those goals will dictate the actions necessary to reach those goals. I can’t do this for you, you’re going to have to figure it out…
I will say, don’t stop to think. Pull out a sheet of paper, a journal, whatever you like, and right now, fill in those timeframes for yourself. Don’t stop and ruminate over them. Just write things down. You don’t have to hold yourself to these when you’ve stepped back and thought longer. But if you just spill out onto that sheet what is in your heart without your head getting in the way, you may realize something about yourself. It might be that you think you can write faster than you can… but it may also be that you’ve been thinking about this for years and your gut response is more than just feeling you can reach the stars if you stretch hard enough. To climb to the stars, you need tools, to build the vehicle, to reach your ultimate goal. It’s possible.
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “Goal-setting for Writers”
Tomorrow? i have no idea what i’ll make tomorrow. someone could throw up in my car at 10 pm and flush my entire driving night. i have to get my car inspected this week and pray it passes. i have no way to project next week, much less next month or beyond.
For writing, not income? I completely understand the unpredictable nature of gig work. Nearly twenty years of it under my belt. What I can control is my production and attitude towards stretching for those goals on a daily basis.
Yes, but that income has direct impact on how many spoons i have left for writing. Maybe ii should have been clearer.
Speaking from the far side of trying to disassemble parts of a publishing business which I’ve built (as business complexity optimization begins to compete with memory competence) take steps now, while you can, about the distribution/marketing beast you’re creating. Build it in chunks that you can remove later. Take permanent notes (which you can find) about all the clever parts you’ve woven together, rather than relying on your memory.
I’ll write until I drop, I imagine, and will publish, too. But other processes: detailed sales tracking, Rube-Goldberg email signup and multi-vendor advertising processes, etc., etc., are in the process of being disassembled (to the degree I can figure out how I put them together in the first place), while there’s still some hope that I can do it in an orderly fashion (where are all those distributors, eh?, and which bank account do they use?)
Writers write as long as they can, but self-published ones are running businesses, too, and it’s easy to forget how to bullet-proof the tech parts of the business as the support and tech offerings change constantly, banks lose tax-ids or go out of business, etc., etc. Marketing is even worse — so many of the options are haphazard (volatile businesses) and time-consuming. Your time isn’t infinite: choose how to spend it for the longest haul you can, and think about the inevitable transitions.
They’re called “business succession” or “business continuity” plans, and every business no matter how small and no matter what field needs one.
Tech has been particularly vulnerable. The founder is a technical wizard… and at some point becomes disinterested in running the business they built.
Write for 15m a day
Finish and put up for view / critique one scene a week
Next few months, determine if I can / want to write stories again
Tomorrow: Nothing. It’s Sunday, and ever since I started selling my stuff, I don’t write on Sundays, as part of my admittedly token effort to keep the Sabbath.
Next Week: I’d really like to finish this story that I’ve started, but I’ve got another project that’s time limited and takes a lot of energy, so I really don’t know.
Next Month: I want to write a boy’s adventure novel. I’ve had the basic idea in my head for at least a year, but I haven’t had the spare cycles to sit down and plan it out, much less get it written.
The other three require more brain power than I have right now.
I’m mid writing project now, so stuff to attempt today for tomorrow is pretty clear.
Some of these divisions do not map neatly to some of my natural time lines for stuff. OTOH, my planning gets pretty LOL, so what I think I know about those is maybe not useful.
I do not know about the lifetime. I’m in a longer project made up of shorter projects, and undecided about how much pain I want to inflict on myself continuing to struggle to the end. Productive life scale goals could be related or unrelated, I have no idea about those.
I have a two week goal, and my optimism and my desire to extrapolate from now are warring. That goal decision or result does a little relate to one, two, or three year thinking.
I’m feeling a little allergic headachey, and a little isolated. This effects a bit any depressive tendency, and also to tendency to run off and do something unrelated to my current investments, where I can feel something, no matter how wasteful.
Before I go to bed each night I review what I plan to write the next day. That’s my daily goal.
At the beginning of each week I go over what needs to be written this week. This is the stuff that needs to be completed to advance my long term goals.
I also have a set of goals that need to be accomplished by the end of each month. I monitor this throughout the month to make sure I am on track to achieve them by the end of the month.
I also have quarterly goals – generally the completion of a book.
At the end of each month I update what I plan to complete over the next twelve months. That’s my running annual goal.
As for long-term or lifetime goals? I achieved one of them last month: to become a full-time writer, with no day job. That took 20 years to achieve. Now it is to complete my list of books I hope to write before I die. (About 20 at present, but the list grows and shrinks over time.)
I have been writing professionally for 30 years. Over that period I have had over 60 books published. I will write four books this year, and hope to do six (with a number of magazine articles) over 2026. You cannot hit those numbers consistently without setting goals and planning ahead.
Do I always achieve my goals? No. Sometimes life intervenes. Then I replan. Or sometimes I hit my numbers early (and again replan). But without goal-setting and planning you do not know whether you are ahead of schedule or behind schedule. I could not have quit the day job unless I was certain I could consistently achieve my writing goals.
Goals are not straightjackets. They are navigation points. They can be redone on the fly. (I got an invitation from an editor to do an interview and do a book review. Because I know what my existing goals and schedules are I knew whether I could add those new assignments into the mix.) But if you do not have a destination – an end goal – it is too easy to drift rudderless.
As Seneca the Younger observed 2000 years ago: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”