Setting Your Writing Goals for 2012

… Good grief, has it really literally been an entire month since I last posted?  Sorry, everyone — my birthday is in early December, and between that, Christmas, and New Year's, I was running on maximum distraction mode.  I did manage to get a few things done last month, but blogging apparently didn't make the list.

Anyway, if you're anything like me, you've finally caught up on sleep after New Year's Eve, and the hangover might be starting to fade.  You're looking over that list of New Year Resolutions you made and thinking, hell, I've blown half of those already.  This might depress you enough that you might even be looking in the back of the fridge to see if there's any of that pitcher of sangria left.

Okay, stop.  Let's back up a second — toss out that list of resolutions and let's start over.  Let's start thinking about our actual goals.

No, wait, keep backing up.  Let's make sure first we know what a "goal" is.

I've always had the same definition as Dean Wesley Smith, who says that a goal is something that is within your control.  If you have a "goal" in mind that relies on someone else — an editor, an agent, anyone else — then that's not a goal:

So when some writer talks to me about a goal of selling a book to a traditional publisher by the end of the year, I just snort and they walk away insulted. I wasn't laughing at their ability to write. Not at all. I was laughing at the goal they set and put a deadline on that was out of their control completely. Such goals are guaranteed to create disappointment.

via Dean Wesley Smith » New World of Publishing: Failure is an Option. Quitting is Not.

He calls these not-goals "dreams", which I think sounds a little dismissive.  I'd call them "ambitions," maybe.

The point is to think about and focus on what you can do.  You can't say, "I'm going to sell 500 books on Amazon next month," because that literally relies on what 500 other people do, and that's not something you get to beat yourself up over.  You can say, "I'm going to finally buy that ad space on Kindle Boards like I keep thinking about," and with any luck maybe that will help you sell those 500 books.

You can set goals for your writing.  Maybe you can decide you're going to write a thousand words a day.  Not bad, totally reasonable.  But then you start thinking, but wait, what if I don't manage to write those thousand words every day? What if I fail?  And then we're back to the sangria again.

Okay, look, if you don't manage to write anything at all after setting such a goal, then maybe you can say you've failed.  But if you're actively reaching for your goal and you fall short of it –

Well — so what?

How many of you took part in NaNoWriMo this past November?  Did you make it all the way to 50,000 words?  No, huh?  Petered out at 38,000 and you've been kicking yourself ever since?

Look, you may not have hit your target, but if you've written a substantial chunk of a probably perfectly salvageable novel, that is not a "failure" by anyone's definition except yours.  Think of that one friend of yours who hasn't written a damn word since English class ten years ago but keeps saying he's "going to be a writer someday."  Him?  He's a failure.  (Although you might not want to say that to his face.)

You didn't hit the target, then you stop, reload, take aim again.

This weekend, think about what exactly you want to take aim at throughout this next year.  I'll be doing the same, and we'll meet up again on Monday.