Setting Long-Term Writing Goals

It’s 12/12/12. Do you know where your characters are?

On one of the blogs to which I subscribe, Creative Writing with the Crimson League, Victoria Grefer posted her rules for writing. Without going into all the details she posted, here are her six rules:

  1. Remember difficulties are normal and to be expected
  2. Remember first drafts don’t have to be perfect
  3. Have a sense of humor about yourself
  4. Don’t worry about what others will think
  5. Read problem paragraphs aloud
  6. Don’t force your will upon your characters

I’m in complete agreement with all of these rules, some more now than ever. If you want to read what I had to say about these rules, check out the comments on Victoria’s blog post.

In this post, I offer my Rule #7:

7. Set realistic long-term writing goals and strive to meet them.

If you have a contract with someone to produce a written work by a certain time, well, you already have your long-term goals set for you. I’m working on a novel in my spare time, on my own time, not for hire, so I need a rule like this to keep myself on track.

Let’s look at each part of this rule.

Be realistic. If you set your goals too high and fail to achieve them or even come close, you run the risk of discouraging yourself to the point of giving up. Just be honest with yourself in setting deadlines. If you give yourself the long-term goal of finishing the first draft of a 80,000-word novel in 30 days, that’s a short-term goal of an average of 2,667 words per day. For me, that wouldn’t be realistic. I gave myself nine weeks to write the first draft of my novel-in-progress, The Unfinished Tower, and that was more realistic.

Set long-term goals. While you might have certain short-term goals, such as writing a certain number of words per day, it helps to have a long-term goal to help you determine what your short-term goals need to be. If you are set on writing a novel and you’re writing the first draft, if you only set short-term goals, you could end up meeting them but not making the progress you’d like on the novel itself. For instance, setting a short-term goal of writing 500 words per day means it will take you 160 days, roughly 5 months, to finish the first draft of an 80,000-word novel. (Note: It will take longer than 5 months if you consider you’ll be throwing away 10% to 20% or more of your first draft. You really need to write 90,000 to 100,000 words in your first draft so you’ll have 80,000 words left over after editing.) Setting a long-term goal of finishing the first draft in two months, for example, means you’ll need to increase your short-term goals to an average of at least 1333 words per day. If that’s not realistic, you’ll have to accept that it will take you longer than you’d like. There’s some give and take between your desires and what is realistic.

Strive to meet your long-term goals. Some days I don’t feel like writing. So I don’t. By having a long-term goal and not focusing on short-term word count goals, I don’t have to feel like I’ve failed because I didn’t make my word count some days. I simply work harder on other days. I don’t let it get to me if I don’t quite make the deadline, either. I missed my goal of nine weeks for the first draft of my novel by a few days. I didn’t look at that as a failure, but I let it motivate me to finish as quickly as I could after my self-assigned deadline passed.

So that’s the rule I offer in addition to Victoria’s Six Rules to Write By. How about you? Do you set long-term writing goals or have other important rules for writing?

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