Lesson One
Tip 1: Determine Your Long-Term Writing Goals
The best way to be productive throughout the summer is to ensure that you know where you are going with your writing goals before the summer starts. This is your first macro assessment and for many writers it may be the hardest. To do macro analysis, you must set and assess your long-term writing goals. These are typically the writing goals you’d like to achieve in the next year. Once you determine what they are, write them down and put them in a prominent place.
Look over your list of long-term goals for the year. Write down the manuscript(s) you want to work on and revise in the next few months. Usually, writers can write one or two manuscripts a year if they find ten hours a week to write. This might sound like a lot of hours. But if you consistently write, even for twenty minutes at a time, you can easily write for that amount of time and even more.
Remember, your long-term writing goals are the foundation of your writing career. So, creating a list of the writing goals you would like to accomplish in the summer is not superfluous or unnecessary step. It is absolutely necessary to know where you are going before you start embarking on the summer with all the family outings or vacations abroad.
Once you have your list of long-term writing goals, you should create your list of short-term goals. These are your writing goals for the next three to six months. This list of goals will help you set weekly and monthly goals. Your short-term goals are like your daily stops on a journey to ensure that you reach your destination of completing your goals. Being aware of these stops along the way is necessary for you to be most successful in completing your goals. I will say more about how to set your short-term goals in the next tip.
Therefore, to be most successful writing through the summer months, you must become aware of your writing goals and always take stock of where you are going in your writing career by writing down your short-term, micro goals and following-through week-by-week. This can help you be most productive during the summer.
Tip 2: Determine Your Short-Term Goals
One of the purposes for setting your short-term writing goals is to break down your long-term goals into manageable segments so that you could achieve them during the summer. Therefore, taking the time to set short-term goals is crucial to your success during the summer months.
Here are some tips to ensure that you are most successful in setting your short-term writing goals:
1. Set your short-term goals every Friday or Sunday, before a new week begins. That way, when Monday arrives, you will know precisely what to work on.
2. Set your monthly goals before a new month starts. That way you’ll be able to know what you must work on to advance and ultimately complete your long-term goals. Further, you will be aware of how many chapters you should write each month in order to complete that book in a year or six months.
3. Set your quarterly writing goals before the summer begins. It is best to evaluate your writing goals on a quarterly basis and determine how you are doing in accomplishing your goals. Try to do this assessment a week before each quarter ends. For instance, for the first quarter assessment, do the assessment during the third week of March.
4. Work towards completing one of your three main writing goals for the year during the summer. Therefore, if one of your yearly goals is to write a book, your second goal is to send out a query every month to a magazine or book publisher, and your last one is to write ten to twelve picture books for personal fulfillment every year, you have to schedule these long-term goals and spread them out over a year. Decide which ones you will work on during the summer.
Therefore, during the summer you may want to focus on writing a few picture books. Or, you may want to revise your WIP or write a few short stories that you can submit in the fall. This is still writing, and it can keep you sharp for the fall. What is more, you will complete some short manuscripts that you can be proud of.
Therefore, setting short-term goals is crucially important to your success during the summer months. Without scheduling them, you will be lost, and you won’t know how long it takes to complete your long-term writing goals. Instead, you will show up to your desk and simply fumble around with the already precious amount of time that you have available to write during the summer. When you’re working with restricted time and energy, you must write notes to remind yourself where you left off. Otherwise, it may be far easier to cruise the internet then to get some writing done which will waste time and frustrate you even further.
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