Hi everyone! Welcome back to my blog at the beginning of a brand-new year and also the beginning of a brand-new series. From the looks of it this year is going to be a rocky one with me so hang in there with me. I will still continue to try to have my series be on time and informative. I also am going to try to stick to my own assigned schedules for this blog, following much the same format I did last year, which was a series followed by a break, a few stand-alone posts, and then another series. So far, I am excited to be able to start off with this very first post of a very new series about Developing as a Writer or Developing Writing.
In this series I will be including all sorts of different topics including how to improve a writing routine, how to develop new writing skills, and different ways to develop a community for you to write in. As I have mentioned at the beginning of several other posts and several other series, this is an advice blog and as such nothing on here is concrete dos and don’ts and some of what I write might work for one person and not another. Writing is a fluid tool and writers come in all different types, styles, and backgrounds so I will try my hardest to give the best advice I can but if you ever have anything you want to add – let me know!
And without further ado…
Develop As A Writer: Making and Keeping Goals
Goals. That little thing that everyone tries to teach you how to do and make from the time you are a young child. But making goals is hard. It’s even harder when you don’t know how to make them, what you should make them about, or how to actually achieve them once you set them. Goal making is especially hard with something so fluid and developing as writing. However, despite these challenges, setting goals that work for you as a writer and actually managing to make those goals is more possible than you would think. During this post I want to break it down into three basic sections: What kind of goals to set, how to set them, and how to achieve them.
What kind of goals to set
Writing has so many different aspects and forms that knowing what parts about it to set goals for is rather difficult. I can’t tell you exactly what to do for your goals since I am not you and every writer needs to set goals that fit for them. But I can tell you what types of goals are the best to set with some examples of them.
First, you need to really understand the why of your writing. You need to ask yourself questions like, “Why am I writing my book?” or “Why do I want to improve as a writer?” These why questions don’t just apply to your book as a whole but also to your writing in general and specific aspects of your writing. These types of questions can help you find something specific that you might want to write your goals about. Once you have found that something specific that’s what you should base your goals around.
Second, once you have your goal idea based around your ‘why’ you need to make sure that whatever your goal is, it is measurable. When I talk to writers I sometimes here them say, “I want to be good at writing description by the end of the year.” That is a really good idea but that isn’t a very good goal. What is ‘good at’? Who determines what ‘good at’ is? A better goal would be measurable. “I want to be able to add at least 5 sentences of description to every scene change and 1 sentence of description to every line of long dialogue.” That goal is measurable. You can count sentences and you can plan how to add more.
Third, the last part of what kind of goal to set is to make sure you set a realistic goal. This is, in my opinion, the most difficult part of setting a goal. You need to be able to sit down and ask yourself, “Can I actually achieve this goal?” but you also need to stretch yourself further than you have before to reach new goals. This is a very difficult equilibrium to achieve. Everyone finds it differently. For me it works best to take a goal I think I can achieve but that might be a little difficult and just move slightly beyond that point and I have a goal that works for me. For example, last year my goal that I thought I could reach fine was, “I want to write at least 15,000 words this Nanowrimo.” 15,000 words I could do. 50,000 words was unrealistic. One was too much of a stretch and one was not enough. So, I made my goal, “I want to write at least 25,000 words this Nanowrimo.” This goal was more realistic but also seemed like it might stretch me.
How to set goals
Once you have an idea of what kind of goal you want to set the next step is actually setting the goal. The very first thing you need to do with any goal is to write it down. Writing something down sets it as more concrete than a mere thought that could slip away, be forgotten, or be ignored. Writing something down proves that at one point in time you did have a solid goal and that it was set down in writing as proof. However, writing down a goal is not always guaranteed to help you remember it. Writing it down makes it permanent, telling someone else about it makes it real. Tell someone else about the goal you have set and what you want to achieve. They can help to hold you responsible for completing the goal and also might give you a bit more motivation to write to that goal.
After you have finished writing down your goal and telling someone else to make it more achievable you need to double check that your goal is the right kind of goal. Go back over the steps we talked about in the last section and make sure that your written goal matches those steps. If it doesn’t – change it. And make sure to tell your friend, family, or other writer that is helping to hold you responsible that you have changed your goal.
The very last step of setting a goal is thinking positively about it. You might think that this is part of achieving a goal, but it really begins back here with setting a goal. Even if you try to think positively about your goal to achieve it, if you haven’t thought positively about it when you set it you won’t be able to gather the motivation to complete it. If when you are setting a goal, you can only think to yourself, “This goal is probably unattainable and I don’t know why I’m even trying.”, then you will have a really hard time later telling yourself that this goal is perfectly achievable and not hard at all.
How to achieve goals
The next step is achieving your goal. You might ask, ‘How do I achieve my goal when it might seem a little too difficult to achieve?’ and that would be a very question. There are a few steps to achieving your goal. The first step would be to imagine achieving your goal. This might seem a little bit of a silly step to take but when you imagine achieving your writing goal you should imagine the things you want to do when you finish or the feelings you will have when you are done. If you keep that imagining in mind when you are working on your goal it will help you to keep your motivation high.
The second step is to break down your goal into smaller steps. For example, if your goal is to write 20,000 words in January, then the first thing you need to do is break that into smaller steps depending on what you think you could achieve. This makes the goal seem much more manageable. If you have a hard time writing consistently make a goal that you want to have 5,000 words at the end of every week and you can work on it anytime in that week. If you work better with consistent goals than try to write 650 or so words everyday to achieve your goal of 20,000 words. Whatever the goal or whatever the number break it down into more manageable and easer to achieve steps.
Once you make those steps, the next thing you need to do is to find a way to track your goal. Whether you use an online writing tracker, a notebook, or an excel sheet, find a way to track your goal and the ways you’ve achieved it. For example, if you’re working on the description goal mentioned earlier in the post then maybe have a small tally sheet on a separate piece of paper where you keep track of descriptive sentences per dialogue or scene. This would make it easier for you to actually see the progress of your goal, this would also help with the next step.
Plan rewards. Once you have smaller steps for your writing goal and you can track it in some way set rewards for yourself when you achieve those goals. Sometimes these rewards can be buying that book you’ve been wanting or those sticky notes you were looking at. Maybe this means taking an extra long break in the evening from writing to read that new book you’ve had on the top of your TBR (To Be Read) stack. Maybe those rewards are even more simpler things like getting to bake a pie that day instead of something healthy. Whatever rewards would help you keep your goals, set them.
The last step of achieving your goal is remembering why you set that goal. This why of your goal is your real motivation for writing and for setting it. Did you set your goal to improve your writing skills? Did you set your goal to help you learn to write more consistently? Did you set your goal to have a more fun time writing? Whatever your why was, keep that in mind as you write because it will help you write better.
That’s all I have to say about goals this week. I hope that this post was helpful. I really enjoyed writing this one and I hope that you can use these skills to help develop goals not just in writing but also in your life. It is the first day of a new year and all, the time to set goals. So go for it – develop new goals using this formula or any other formula that you find helpful. Next week’s post will be about developing an organizational system and I hope that it’s just as helpful as this one. So, remember …
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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