Writing Goals for 2020
Happy New Year! What will you accomplish in 2020?
I believe that writers, maybe more than any other artists
and certainly more than other professionals, need to set goals for themselves. Creativity
doesn’t have to be undisciplined, and I can’t imagine calling yourself a writer
if you aren’t producing work. That doesn’t necessarily mean forcing yourself to
write 1,000 words a day, but aiming toward finishing a project by a certain
date might make it more likely that you will actually finish that project. And
if you do, then you can move on to the next one. Or so my thinking goes, at any
rate.
My goals aren’t resolutions. I’ve got those, too, but that’s
a whole other subject, one that I’ll keep to myself. Goals are what I want to
get done in 2020, and they’re meant to be far more specific than resolutions.
But before I can articulate what my 2020 goals are, I need to look back at the
goals I set for myself a year ago to see how I did. You can see my post about
2019 Writing Goals here.
My first goal for 2019 was to finish the novel that was my work-in-progress. Didn’t happen. Didn’t
come close. I struggled with it all year long. I think I now see a way forward,
but the picture only improved recently. Since I didn’t finish the novel, I also
didn’t query agents for the novel.
Two strikes! But then: I did launch my
debut novel and I did prepare my new
story collection for publication. The novel came out in May and the story
collection is currently out gathering blurbs for its expected publication in
May of 2020. Not only did I submit a
story for publication, the story in question found a very good home and was
published in a print journal in the fall of 2019. I actually wrote and
published several book reviews
during the year, and I also updated the
literary magazine rankings, which people seem to find useful. So I missed
on the first goal in a big way, but I managed to do almost everything else, so
I feel pretty good about the year. (I was also going to write at least one essay, and I didn’t finish it, but
I did start it, at least.)
Which brings us to 2020 and my writing goals for this year:
Launch my new story collection. Publication
of House of the Ancients and Other
Stories (Press 53) is scheduled for May 12, 2020 and we’re currently
finalizing the galleys and gathering blurbs for the cover. Between now and then
I have a lot to do to arrange some appearances and signings, but the work of
publication is now mostly out of my hands.Finalize
edits for my new novel. My novel Oliver’s
Travels will be published by Regal House Publishing in the spring of 2021.
Regal House takes a different approach than my previous publishers, and has a
rigid schedule of how and when edits will be done so that galleys can go out to
reviewers well in advance of publication. So this work will begin very soon and
should be done by the fall. Write and
submit a personal essay. I’ve been giving nonfiction a lot of thought
lately, and I think I want to try my and at the personal essay form. I started
work on an essay in 2019 and I’d very much like to finish that and submit it to
magazines in 2020.Write and
publish one or more book reviews. I was happy with the reviews I wrote in
2019 and I already have one commissioned review for 2020 with at least one more
in process. I’m also sitting on a couple of advance copies of 2020 books that
might turn into reviews. We’ll see.Update
the Literary Magazine Rankings. The 2021 Pushcart Prize anthology will be
out in the fall and I will update the rankings as soon as I get my hands on the
volume. People do seem to appreciate the work I do on this. If you’re not
familiar with the rankings, check out the 2020
Literary Magazine Rankings. Finish my
Work-in-Progress. This is the same goal I had in 2019 that I failed to
meet, but I do think it’s possible to do this year. Or, at least, I can finish
a complete draft. I won’t necessarily say that I’m going to query agents with
it, however, because it will need to be polished to do that, so that’s
something that might have to wait for 2021.Apply to
Writing Residencies, etc. I didn’t include this goal last year, but it’s
definitely part of the business, so I need to take a look at conferences,
residencies, and book festivals to see which ones make sense for me.
