Goals: You Must Pay the Price

 This post is part of the Five Year Project/Do You Have Goals blog hop.

My Five Year Goals: 
1. Finish the Sons of Jacob poem series.
2. Build up this blog til it's popular like Mike Duran's.
3. Finish 3 novels.

Setting goals. It's kind of like being a kid at Christmas Winter Holiday and making a Christmas Santa Claus list. But it's not enough to set the goals. You must follow through. And the first step to that is being willing to pay the price.

Each goal comes with its own built-in price, and this differs from writer to writer. For example, some writers, unlike me, didn't learn spelling and English grammar in their school, and so part of their price is to go back and study these things so they can write well-crafted or at least correctly spelled and understandable English sentences.

A novel-writing goal always comes with a reading 'price'. You need to be well-read in your genre--- the classics of the genre, older genre works, and today's newest offerings. You don't HAVE to follow the latest trends in a genre, but you DO need to know what these trends are to work within the genre with confidence. (You might find your writing ideas place you in an emerging subgenre. Or maybe you will start a whole new subgenre.) So perhaps we all need to include 'read 3 novels a month in my genre(s).' Not to mention outside-of-genre and nonfiction reading. (Note to mainstream and literary fiction writers: those are 'genres', too. At least as far as the reading requirement goes.)

Sometimes the 'price' means overcoming problems of disorganization, as in the case of a person with AD/HD. I have Asperger Syndrome, which comes with 'executive function deficit'. Which essentially means AD/HD. So you may need to search out organizing tips for AD/HD people to find organizational ways that work for YOU.

You may need to overcome psychological issues. I have a sort of chronic writer's block which when it hits makes it next to impossible to work any further on the current WIP, or even on any writing. I am currently reading a number of books which help writers with these issues.

Self-confidence is a major problem for writers. Your 'price' likely will include working on this. I can recommend 'Write for your Life' by Lawrence Block as a help with that. (It's a bit new-agey, but the affirmations technique is also recommended by Christian pastor Norman Vincent Peale in 'The Power of Positive Thinking'.)

So as you look over your goals, think: are you willing to pay the price? What will that price be? What steps can you take to pay it?

My goals update:
1. Have written 2 of the poems and taken notes on the third.
2. Am working on posting on this blog and commenting on other blogs more regularly.
3. Planning to participate in NaNoWriMo with a cross-genre novel (Jane Eyre inspired Gothic with a sci-fi setting) that doesn't seem as complex as my previous, unfinished NaNo novels. Currently at work writing an outline of a favorite Gothic novel that will serve as a model for my own novel's outline. Writing starts Nov. 1. My NaNo page: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/ilsabein





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October Writing Goals: Poems, Yes, Word Counts, No

October Worksheet

It's October, and that means it's time to think about writing goals for the month. What do you hope to accomplish this month?

What did you accomplish last month? For me, I had set the goal to work on writing the outline and scenes for a somewhat complicated writing project, Starship Destine. I had 5704 words already written on this, and I planned to write 500 words a day, 6 days a week, for a total word count of 18205 by the end of the month. I only managed 15491 words.

This month I decided, for this month, to ditch the fixed word counts. And the writing projects for the month will for the first time include poetry, which I've always treated as a poor step-sister of prose before now.

My goal is to write at least 31 poems in the month. I also work on a series of poems I started called Sons of Jacob. And I want to write more sijo (Korean poetic form).

My writing project from September has been hairy since it involves some characters I've had in my head since childhood, and there are loads of stray story bits that don't seem to be easy to fit together into a single short novel. I divided the boatload of plot ideas into 3 novels. The name for the series, Starship Destine, doesn't fit this first story very well since the starship doesn't come in until near the end. So its current title is Tiberius Base and it will tell the tale of the disintegration of the Terran Confederacy's General Assembly and how the Fleet became an independent entity among the deeply  divided Terran worlds. (Watching the politics shows will be great inspiration for this.) The story will be told almost entirely from the viewpoint of a very young Fleet cadet who is a psion--- the first to ever be allowed in the Fleet.

I'm going to be doing both outlining (Snowflake Method) and writing scenes for Tiberius Base, and possibly writing a few short poems to serve as chapter headings for it.

So, now it's up to you to make your own plans, and then to carry them out. Or find some other writerly thing to do instead.


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Setting Goals: May 2013 25000 Word PDF Worksheet

This May my writing goal is 25000. In other words, 1/2 the pace of NaNoWriMo. After reading a book by James Scott Bell, I've decided to NOT put a daily word count goal (which would be 926) but a weekly one. Also, I've decided to plan on taking Sundays off.

I made a worksheet for the month as I so often do. I made it in rather large print and with a space to put a small sticker next to each successful writing day. I then transformed it into PDF format so I could share it with people, and posted it with Google Drive. You should be able to download the PDF to your computer and print it out. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByKmSBhOQ1FSX21HTUkyeFFIelE/edit?usp=sharing

My word count goal this month was based on an event on the Facebook page The Writer's Whip, the 25K MAY WRITING CHALLENGE. Visit those links for more info. While you are at it you can visit my own new author page: Nissa Annakindt, writer, Aspie, cat person.

Charting your December Writing Progress

November is over, and the writing goals we had for that month have either been achieved or.... not. We have won or lost NaNoWriMo, perhaps.

But this is a new month and time for a new writing challenge: writing steadily and daily at a more modest minimum pace of 1000 words per day, which works out to about 4 pages per day if you are comparing it to the writing paces announced by old-time writers like Lawrence Block, who claimed to average 5 words per day.

I like to chart my month's work on a nice clean document I created on my OpenOffice word processing software. Illustrated above is this month's version. (If you would like to use mine rather than make your own, you can download a PDF version.) I pin the current month's chart on the frame of my desk so it's to the left of my work area and at eye level. Other month's charts are stored--- well, pinned in a stack on a bulletin board--- to remind me of how I've worked when I'm being harsh with myself.

For each day you have a daily word count goal, and a running total, to enter. I compose my fiction using the free YWriter software, which at the bottom of the screen tells you not only the running word count of your project, but how many words you wrote that day. (The software also has you sorting out your work into chapters and scenes, and so if you get stuck you can skip ahead to some other scene you feel more ready to write.)

These days many authors consider keeping up with their author blog a part of their working day. I have put in a section called 'Blogging WC', to give myself credit for that. I write many of my blog posts offline in my YWriter software and so know the word count. You can write the number of blog posts instead.

There is also a section for notes. I'm not quite sure what I'm using mine for. Perhaps for check marks for the number of writing sessions in a day, since I'm trying to get in the habit of dipping-in to my novel more often during each day. I'm a morning writer, and when I get caught up in other activity in the morning, it usually means my writing session doesn't happen. That must change!

The important thing is to set goals for yourself that are a challenge, but ones you can meet. NaNoWriMo is a challenge that gives us a set word count of 1667 words per day (around 7 pages). If you don't normally produce that kind of output, it can be a good challenge.

But for a non-NaNo month, you are free to set yourself an easier goal. I chose 4 pages a day because I often don't have it all that easy getting to 1000 words, but it's not as difficult as 1667. I may choose slower paces yet in a future month, as well as having more challenging months.

For me, this year's NaNo was a struggle. I started a novel, got some better ideas, and deleted the few thousand words I had to start again. The second version only got to about 5000 pages--- and it needed to be scrapped and begun a third time. I still hope to get to it. Just not this month. I want to give it some time to percolate in my head for a while.

Starting fresh this month feels right. As you can see from the worksheet which presumes starting with a new novel in the running total WC goal column. (If you are creating a worksheet for a month of continuing an already-begun novel, just add your already existing word count in for the total WC goal column.)

I've been making up these charts for a while now. I think I make more progress by setting a goal each month and making a chart reflecting that. It helps keep me on-task, and the thrill of putting in my WC each day is a tiny reward.

Have you set your December writing goals yet? What in particular are you planning to work on? Do you have a good method to record your daily progress?