Tip 5: Set Your Long-Term Writing Goals
The best way to be an organized and productive writer you must ensure that you know where you are going in your writing career. To do this, you must set and assess your long-term writing goals on a regular basis. 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.
To create your organized list of goals, write down the manuscripts you want to write and revise in the next year. Brainstorm your list if you need to and decide on how many manuscripts its realistic for you to write this year, given your schedule. Usually, working writers can write one or two manuscripts a year if they schedule 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.
From your brainstormed list, determine the most important manuscripts you’d like to focus on. Choose no more than three manuscripts to complete. Then put the other manuscripts on your list for next year. Ideally, create this list at the beginning of the year. By January 1st of each year make sure you have a good idea of what you’d like to accomplish by the end of the year. This is your road map to success.
Your long-term goals are the foundation of your writing career. So, don’t treat creating this list as superfluous or unnecessary. It is necessary to know where you are going before you start embarking on your journey.
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. I will discuss how to set your short-term goals in the next tip.
To be most successful as a working writer, you must take steps to become more organized by always take stock of where you are going in your writing career by writing down your goals and following-through.
Tip 6: Set Your Short-Term Writing Goals
One of the purposes for setting short-term writing goals is to break down your long-term goals into manageable parts so that you could achieve them in an organized manner. Therefore, taking the time to set short-term goals is crucial to your success as a writer because you will be able to organize your goals in the process.
Here are a few tips to make sure that you are most successful in setting and achieving your short-term writing goals:
1. Set your short-term goals every week ideally on Friday or Sunday the week before. That way, when you get to your desk on Monday, 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 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 quarter begins. It is best to evaluate your writing goals on a quarterly basis and accurately determine how you are doing. Do this assessment a week or two before one quarter ends. For instance, for your first quarter assessment, assess how you did with completing your goals during the third week of the third month of the year.
4. Make sure that you are working on your three main writing goals for the year. For instance, if one of your yearly goals is to write a book, your second goal is to send out a query a month to a magazine or book publisher, and your last one is to write twelve picture books for personal fulfillment every year, schedule these long-term goals and spread them out over a year.
Further, when you are scheduling your short-term goals for your first writing goal of writing a book in a year, schedule time to write a chapter every month or every few weeks. Then as you complete your short-term writing goals for this main writing goal, you will be completing your book, one to two chapters a month.
Further, if your long-term goal is to write twelve picture book manuscripts every year, you will have to schedule writing one picture book manuscript a month for a year. That way, you will complete that long-term goal.
Therefore, short-term goals are crucially important to your success as a writer. Without scheduling them, you will be lost, and you won’t know how to complete your long-term writing goals. Instead, you will show up to your desk and simply fumble around during your writing time. When you’re working with restricted time and energy, you must write detailed notes to remind yourself what you need to complete during a writing session. Otherwise, it may be far easier to cruise the internet then to get some writing done which will waste time and frustrate you.
Here is an example of how to set your goals for the week. This is a page from my weekly planner a while ago.
Manuscripts to Work on this Week:
• Write Working Writer E-book
• Revise Be True to Yourself
Overall Goals for this Week:
• Write 2 tips per day, times 5 days
• Revise Be True to Yourself: 5 chapters, one per day
Breakdown of Goals:
Monday:
• Write 2 Tips of Working Writer E-Book
• Revise 1 chapter of Be True
Tuesday:
• Write 2 Tips of Working Writer E-Book
• Revise 1 chapter of Be True
Wednesday:
• Write 2 Tips of Working Writer E-Book
• Revise 1 chapter of Be True
Thursday:
• Write 2 Tips of Working Writer E-Book
• Revise 1 chapter of Be True
Friday:
• Write 2 Tips of Working Writer E-Book
• Revise 1 chapter of Be True
Saturday:
• Plan Next Week’s Goals
• Write them down in your planner and put them in a prominent place on your desk
By creating a concrete writing schedule such as this for your week, you will be organized on every day of the week. That way, you will know what to work on when you are tired and frustrated from your day at work. See the Appendix for the necessary forms you will need.
That's it for now!
Irene Roth
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