Tips for Writers: Get Back to Work!

'Tis the Season for New Years' Resolutions, and, like a lotof writers, my resolutions touch on my writing goals, although mostly theycircle around writing: reading more/better literature will help refine my own style;reading more literary magazines will help me understand better what thejournals are looking for; staying off the Internet will free up time foreverything else. (I could probably tie in the eating better/exercising moreresolutions, too.)
It all boils down to discipline. And the search fordiscipline explains my attempts at meditation and my reading on that subject—still waiting for thatto work. But part of my effort to improve discipline involves goal-setting.
I know writers who set daily word-count goals, and I do thatsometimes, such as during a NaNoWrimo push. (My goal for this November was 2500words per day, and I stuck to that for most of the month, easily surpassing theoverall goal of 50,000 words.) When I'm in revision mode, I may set a page-countgoal rather than focusing on the number of words. I did that in August when Iwas at a writing retreat in France, working on the revision to my novelmanuscript: the number of pages I had to get through divided by the number daysavailable. That worked well.
Most of the time, though, I'm floundering. I hate to admitthat, but some days I sit at my desk and I don't know what to write. It's notwriter's block, exactly. It's more fundamental than that. It's not knowing.It's not being ready to move on in the given project. And so on days like that—days like today, forexample—I writesomething else: a blog post, like this one; a book review (I did thatyesterday); ideas for something I might want to write in the future. If I'mreally struggling, I might read something relevant to writing—I just started The Writer's Journey by ChristopherVogler.
But what I don't do is leave my desk, at least not duringthe hours I set aside only for writing. I don't go run errands when I should bewriting. I don't do housework. I don't read magazines or books unless they'rerelated to the work. Or, if I do let my attention wander into other realms, I remind myself, like a student of meditation, to begin again. In other words, even if a word-count goal or a page-countgoal isn't feasible, then my objective is simple: get back to work. And that,basically, is my New Year's Resolution for 2012. [image error]