Some Goals...

I am back writing on my detective novel again, which is a ways from first draft completion.  Still, something has me moving forward with it, and I was once again able to chunk out five hundred words on it tonight.  I am shooting for about two thousand words a week, which isn't too much, compared to the frenzied eleven thousand a week for NaNoWriMo.  Still, it is keeping me in an almost daily writing routine, which is good, and I'm starting to get the characters back in my head after a break.

As for this little writing blog, I am going to be taking a separate approach with it shortly.  I think I am going to expand it beyond a simple chronicle of my word counts and varied projects.  I have been listening quite a bit lately to Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing podcast, both while just driving in the car or in the airplane while I have been flying back and forth across the country, and have been inspired a little by what she has to say.  In addition, it's good to hear confirmation from the mouths of published authors about what aspiring writers need to be focused on and their tips and tricks of the craft.  I also like her "for aspiring fiction writers, by an aspiring fiction writer" mantra that she intros the show with, which builds a level of solidarity with her listeners.

That said, I'm not starting a podcast.  Nor am I going to rip off things that Mur has said on her podcast because, well, you can just click the link and download her podcast.  But, I do think that I may try to at least once a week post more than a personal journal progress bar and update a number.  Because there is more to it than that.  I have no clue what form these sorts of posts will take, but I would like to take my current phase in a writing project or take my current thoughts on the world of writing and publishing and then shoot it out to the world via blog.  We'll see.

What's going on right now?  Just some goal-setting.  For me, that includes some near-term goals and longer-term goals.  I don't know about anyone else, but for me, goalsetting puts a target out there to achieve, and helps propel me forward.  But you can't just make any type of goals.  They have to meet a few criteria to even be worthwhile:

• Specific - Sure, it's great to have a goal to "make a ton of money" or to "sell more copies of a single book than the entire Twilight series has sold," but without a plan to get there, this may just be like that New Year's Resolution that you have made the past four years in a row and seem to forget by February.  I recommend that your goals be extremely specific, which helps to put an achievable face on them.  Which leads to...
• Achievable - By this I don't mean set a goal that you think you can achieve.  You should set goals that you know you can achieve given work in a particular direction.  It would be silly to say "I have a goal of selling ten million copies of a book this year" if you haven't even written a book, and sold nine million copies of it.  But a goal of "finishing my book this year" or "finding an agent" may be much more attainable, depending on your current state.
• Packaged with a deadline - Ah, the power of the deadline.  NaNoWriMo's charge towards November 30 every year reminds me of the strength and power of a deadline, whether enforced by yourself or by everyone you told about your goal and the threat of humiliation.  When you set goals for yourself, make sure you have an end date in mind by which you need to have completed or achieved your goal.
• A conglomeration of work units - In order to reach any of your lofty goals, you will need to be able to take it from the theoretical to the practical, by identifying a set of project steps or work units that, once completed, take you to the goal.  Think of it like a trip to the mall.  You can have a goal of going to the mall.  To achieve that goal, though, you will need to get in the car, drive to the mall, and get out of the car.  Getting in the car will require opening the door, sitting into the driver's seat, putting the key in the ignition, etc.  Each of these steps, in turn, can be broken into even smaller steps until the step itself is so extremely simple that it would not make sense to continue the step-creation exercise.  Likewise, a goal to finish your first draft may be broken into finishing your current chapter, or the next thousand words, or the next sentence.  At some point, even your most daunting writing tasks may come down to typing that next word, then doing it again.

Once you have identified your goals, I recommend you write them down.  This lends a finality to the deadline piece of the goal and helps you to track your progress as you move towards the deadline.  Once you have written your goals down, you can start to organize them, into long-term, mid-term, and short-term goals.  The closer the deadlines, the more well-defined and obtainable the goals should be, so that you can see exactly how to proceed from this point to achieve the goal by the deadline.

Finally, take some time periodically to reassess your goals.  Do your deadlines need to be adjusted?  Are you going to achieve some of them ahead of time?  Have your priorities changed?  As you grow and as you achieve some of your goals, you will find that your other goals adjust or are shifted in priority.

As for me, my current short-term is just to finish my first draft of this work, with some specific timelines around it.  And then to move towards editing and generating story concepts for a second book in the series.  There are a few other smaller items in my plan, but those will be stepping stones towards my larger projects and goals.