With the holiday season coming to a close and the New Year right around the corner, the time for reevaluating goals and establishing routines that will help us reach them is fast approaching. January offers an opportunity to start fresh and set writing goals for the year ahead. But how do we set goals we can actually reach?
A quick note: Each new year brings a sort of pressure to set new goals, get into a routine, and somehow be good and perfect in every way just because it’s a new year. While January does offer a great time to evaluate goals and routines, there really is no need to set resolutions that you hold yourself to at the expense of your stress levels and happiness. Author Leigh Bardugo has been sharing this alternative to resolutions online for years and I’d like to share it with you now: BAYMTGO—begin as you mean to go on. Don’t set impossible, shiny resolutions that make you feel guilty when things don’t go perfectly and you can’t reach them. Don’t buy into the idea that you have to reinvent yourself every January. Instead, BAYMTGO encourages making time for the things you care about and taking the small steps that bring you closer to them throughout the year. Leigh encourages everyone to spend time—even fifteen minutes—on January 1st doing something you care about, beginning the year as you mean to go on. Whether that be writing or not, a mindset that focuses on small steps instead of big plans is what’s important. It’s that mindset I’ve kept in mind while breaking down how to best set writing goals.
I originally wrote this post for House of Cadmus.
Staring down the process of writing a novel can be daunting for even the most experienced of writers and downright paralyzing for newer writers. It requires discipline, perseverance, and focus, yet you also have to somehow maintain and balance these with the passion and free-flowing creativity that fuels your ideas and the writing process. If you want to finish your novel, whether for yourself or for publication, you need to be able to balance the rigidity of a writing schedule with the excitement for your story that made you write it in the first place.
The key to this balancing act is setting writing goals you can actually reach. Not big-picture “I want to be published” goals, but manageable daily goals that will break your novel writing into bite-sized pieces and help bolster you along your writing path. Setting goals gives you the short-term motivation to reach your long-term goals and clarifies exactly how you’ll reach those long-term goals without reaching the burnout point that can leave so many writers floundering, unsure of how to tackle what needs to be done.
Scientifically proven to increase productivity, reaching the goals you’ve set is also proven to increase motivation; the more you see yourself accomplishing your goals, the more motivated you’ll be to keep going. Setting challenging but manageable goals is the first step in a cycle that will keep you making progress, but what should you consider when setting your goals?
Be Realistic
If writers could take one thing away from this article, it would be this so-obvious-it-seems-pointless-to-mention piece of advice: be realistic.
Writing goals are set to help you make your way through the vast, difficult, seemingly untamable landscape of writing. And while it’s exciting to imagine the end product of our efforts, it can also be easy to lose our sense of reality in those big dreams and set ourselves up for failure. Learning to hold on to that excitement while still distancing yourself enough to be realistic when creating goals is difficult, but you must do it.
Being realistic, in part, means tossing aside the idea that another writer’s formula, goals, or schedule will work for you. It won’t. Don’t use goals to punish yourself for not being as fast or organized or productive as other writers. There may be elements of other writers’ schedules that help you establish your own, but resigning yourself to matching someone else’s daily goals will only bring you stress and, ultimately, failure.
Good goals should challenge us, but setting goals we know we probably will not be able to reach only causes us to push ourselves too far, driving ourselves to high levels of stress and pressure that contaminate and stall the writing process. It begins a cycle of failure that will land blow after blow to your motivation, confidence, and, ultimately, your mental health.
The single most important thing to remember when setting your goals is to base them off of your own life, your own WIP, and your own limits only. Don’t waste time worrying that your daily or monthly goals aren’t big enough or difficult enough. Disregard the writing goals, advice, and accomplishments of every other writer the moment you recognize yourself using them as things to measure your own “failures” up against. As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy. Comparison can also be the thief of progress.
Don’t set big goals you can’t realistically meet. Set small goals and reach them over and over.
Get Specific
There’s no place for vagueness in setting goals. “I want to be a better writer” doesn’t cut it when you’re staring at a blank screen, wondering where to go next. Measurable, bite-sized goals provide the pathway for you to reach your project goal.
Type
The type of goals you want to reach can be broken down into two categories: time-based goals and progress-based goals.
Time-based goals are measured by how much time you aim to dedicate to writing each day while progress-based goals are measured by the actual progress made within your writing—by word count, by page, by scene, etc.
Form your goals by considering what is most important to you, what works best with your existing schedule, and what is most realistic for you. Is it more realistic for you and impactful for your WIP to write freely for two hours a day, regardless of word count? Or does nailing down a word count goal of 1,500 words per day make more sense for your overall goals?
Progress-based goals could be more beneficial to writers looking to meet a deadline or ensure they’re making a certain amount of progress within their WIP. If tracking your word count only stresses you out, track by time. Find what works best for you—don’t be afraid to try both progress and time-based goals before you settle with either one.
Think Small
When setting writing goals, specificity and scheduling are key. To reach big goals, you need to think small. Break down your project goals into manageable daily tasks that will keep you making continuous progress.
Define your overall project goal as much as possible. Work your way backwards from those long-term, big-picture project goals to determine exactly what needs to happen for you to reach them. Outlining, plotting, the actual writing—break it all down. What can you realistically aim for in a month? Go further. What can you aim for in a week? A day?
By word count, by chapter, by time spent writing, by whatever measurable accomplishment you choose, you must be able to identify small tasks that will become your daily goals. They are your stepping stones to your project goal.
Schedule
Research has shown that people are two to three times more likely to accomplish their goals if they plan exactly when, where, and how they’ll execute them.
Plan and schedule exactly how you will reach your writing goals and write them down. Writing your goals out—longhand on an actual physical piece of paper—also makes you more likely to stick to them. Do it—it makes a difference and is a great, simple way to hold yourself accountable.
Practice writing your goals in the form of “I will” statements. Go after your goals with a positive mindset—form them with positive, powerful statements declaring your intentions. You will reach your goals. Don’t allow any room for doubt in your planning.
Train your brain to associate positivity with your goals, not the stress or reluctance that can often accompany the tasks we must complete. While this is a simple method of maintaining your own outlook and accountability, it’s also a way to help preserve the creativity and enjoyment of writing by combatting the negativity before it sets in.
Support Your Goals
Once you have your goals set and know exactly when, where, and how you’re going to accomplish them, you need to prepare to support your future efforts. Knowing exactly what you’re going to need to accomplish your goals in terms of outside influences and obstacles allows you to be as prepared as possible.
Control Your Environment
Support yourself by preparing the environment in which you’ll be writing beforehand. Know you’ll be writing at your desk tomorrow morning? Take the few minutes to organize it tonight, putting away anything that might distract you and leaving out all the supplies you may need including notebooks, pens, your notes, etc. Remove the need to get up and search for anything once you’re writing.
In removing any distractions, be honest with yourself as you assess your own tendencies. Do you tend to procrastinate by reading articles online? Will notifications on your phone or computer distract you? If you need to search something related to your writing, are you at risk of getting lost in something else that pops up? Consider leaving your phone in another room (or at least away from your fingertips and sightline) and possibly turning off your computer’s WiFi so browsing the internet isn’t an option.
While these measures may be unrealistic for some, if you are able to try them, do so. Writing is so difficult in the face of constant distractions. Part of supporting yourself as you work toward your writing goals is making sure you create the environment that will maintain the bubble of focus and creativity necessary to fully immerse yourself in your work.
Make Your Goals Known
It’s easier to let ourselves slack off or not hold ourselves to our goals when we do so quietly.
Share your goals with family and friends. Not only will their awareness of your goals help spur you along in the moments you feel like slacking off (no one wants to fail with everyone watching), but their support is invaluable. When you feel doubt start creeping in, when you need someone to remind you of your WIP’s worthiness and your own ability to finish what you started, turn to them.
Sometimes having family and friends who support you, while lovely, isn’t quite all that writers need. Sometimes you need the trusted voice of someone who has experienced what you’re going through right now—you need a fellow writer. If you don’t know any in your personal life, consider joining a writing group to find the support you need or try reaching out to fellow writers on social media. The online writing community is helpful, kind, and supportive. You will find people who will have your back during your writing process.
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There’s no need to pick just one or two writing friends to share your goals with if you don’t want to—sharing writing goals and updates on social media is also a great way of holding yourself accountable. If you know your fellow writers and online audience are cheering you on and waiting for your next writing update, it will encourage you all the more to get back to work.
Plan for the Inevitable
Life gets busy, things get put on the back burner.
Don’t let your writing become something you continually put off, expecting life will free up time for you to write eventually.
Plan for the inevitable as much as you can. Have a backup plan already in mind for the shifts that come from out of the blue. Maybe this means when your normal writing time is off the table, you know you’ll get up earlier in the morning to reach at least half of your normal word count goal. Or maybe it means when the whole day’s schedule gets moved around unexpectedly, you’ll fit in a 20-minute writing sprint before bed.
Whatever the solution may be, try to have an idea of your fallbacks before the situations arise. You will save yourself the guilt of not having met that day’s goal and save your writing routine and momentum.
Be Kind to Yourself
While setting goals and working hard to reach them is vitally important to making finishing a WIP manageable, your happiness and mental health need to be prioritized as well.
It’s Not the End of the World
Somedays you won’t be able to meet your goal—sometimes, regardless of schedules and plans and fallbacks, you just can’t. Writing goals are designed to help us avoid writer’s block and stagnation within our WIPs, but it will still happen sometimes. Some days you won’t be able meet your goal or even get a good word on the page. And guess what? It’s fine. You can always pick right back up where you left off.
Feeling the full weight of the responsibility of our dreams can be a lot. It can be difficult to find the balance between holding yourself accountable to your goals and recognizing when you need a break, but it is a balance you need to be able to find. Practice recognizing the difference between feeling lazy, uninspired, or unmotivated and truly needing a break to avoid feeling too stressed or overwhelmed.
Yes, you’re the only one who will work for your dreams to come true, you’re the only one who can write your story. But you’re also the only one who can take care of your mental health and determine when you need a break. Don’t push yourself too far and make writing something you dread.
Learn the signs of your own building frustration and give yourself a break from writing. Or give yourself a break from your WIP, but write something for your own amusement. It can be something unrelated to your WIP or even a little vignette within your WIP’s world that has no point other than to bring you joy and allow you to reconnect with your story and characters. Whether you take a break from writing or try to write something else, come back refreshed and motivated.
Celebrate Every Small Win
One of the most important parts of goal setting is celebrating your accomplishments. Don’t move on to the next goal like you didn’t just smash the last one. Don’t just keep your eyes ahead on the next thing to be accomplished. Take a breath between goals and acknowledge your success. And share your successes with others—they’re there to support and celebrate you just as much to help you keep going. Recognizing your success is necessary to keeping you excited and motivated to keeping moving forward.
Celebrate your success anyway you like. Maybe it means some sort of reward—a special expensive coffee drink you normally don’t have after a full week of reaching your daily word count goals—or maybe it’s just taking some time for yourself, relaxing and basking in the joy of accomplishing what you aimed for. Whatever it may be, don’t let your hard work go unacknowledged.
Every goal met moves you closer and closer to finishing your WIP—it’s well worth celebrating.
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