Tag Archives: adversity

Goals Part 3: Evaluating

Colette Black The Writing Life 4 Comments

I’ve always been big on goals. But evaluating them can get discouraging, especially as I rarely accomplish my goals. One of my kids asked me once, “Why set goals if you’re not going to accomplish them anyway?” I responded, “So I accomplish something.” There is more to life than destinations. There’s the journey.   Setting goals gives us direction.

Each year, as I evaluate my goals, it’s more than a checklist. It’s a compass reading. How much of my plan did I implement? What can I change so I can do the things required to reach my goal? Why and when did I lose sight of the plan? How can I approach the goal in a better way? How can I enlist support from friends/family? How should I change the goal so I can be more successful next year? If I achieved my goal, what else would I like to work on? This kind of self-evaluation corresponds with our writing goals as well as our personal ones.

We should never set goals for things outside of our control, like landing an agent or publisher, but there is so much within our grasp. When we evaluate our productivity goals– how much time was spent writing, the number of pages, chapters, or stories finished–we have an opportunity to see what worked and what didn’t. We can look at our habits and writing patterns and decide how best to get our BICFOK (Butt in Chair, Fingers on Keyboard) at our optimum writing times. We can evaluate what got in the way, why, and how to change it.

As for that agent/publisher, we can set goals to meet people, to submit our work, and to do anything and everything we are capable of making happen in order to encourage their acceptance of our work. In the end, though, it’s their decision.

Now, I’m coming to the end of the most unproductive month I’ve ever had. There are a few reasons for that: started planning for the holidays later than I should have, overextended myself to family and friends, didn’t take the time to write during the days like I usually would, and spent too much time in the evenings watching TV because I was too tired. In evaluating the way my goal progress tanked, I can make some decisions. I’ll set a date to start the holiday shopping, I’ll set time parameters for holiday projects instead of committing myself to unreasonable time-consuming activities, I’ll reduce the shows I follow and schedule when I’ll watch them instead of staying up late or letting it eat into my writing time.

Will I slip-up or forget some of these goals through the course of the year? Sure. Looking over them on a regular basis will help, but I’ve never yet achieved even half the goals I set for myself. But I usually get a few. There’s no reason to give up on goal-setting just because we fall short. The purpose is to give direction, not perfection.

So, good luck on setting your goals. Remember to keep them specific, attainable, and limit your focus to a few of the things most important to you. And if you don’t reach them all, that’s what assessment is all about; we always have the opportunity to keep trying.  As writers, that should be a concept with which we’re painfully familiar. Happy Writing in 2012!

 

Road Maps Help Get You There

Clancy Metzger Craft & Skills The Fictorians The Writing Life Writing Tools 7 Comments

I have found in my writing and in my life, that if I make a list, take notes, outline, plan – I will get whatever it is needs done just that much easier and quicker.

I’m talking about making a six month, one year, five year plan for your writing and for your life.  They aren’t the same, although sometimes it may feel that way.  As a sidebar – life is what feeds our writing, so don’t ignore it or you may find your writing drying up and getting stale from lack of fresh inspiration.

Family, friends, classes, the bowling league, hobbies, reading and the latest movie are not only food for your soul but food for your writing.  Do you know how high a priority they are?  Will you have that on your list in a year or five?  Think about it…

My friends know my schedule is hectic, so if they want to have time with me, it has to be scheduled.  I make time for my friends because they are important to me, but I also have to literally make time for them or they get lost in the craziness of my schedule.  They are a high priority and on my master plan, so that is covered. 

I recently had to turn down helping on an event in 2012 I really wanted to do because I didn’t have the time to commit to it.  Is it now on my plan for 2013? You bet it is.  I have a plan for it and other things will have to get sacrificed so I can participate, but that’s ok.  I’m planning ahead so I know what’s coming up, what needs done, and when.

What about your writing?  Will you have one book done a year, two a year, one epic and one novella?  What’s your goal?  What’s the plan to get there?  How are you going to accomplish it?  Do you write intently one weekend a month, a page a day, an hour a day?  All this planning helps you accomplish your goals. It really does. 

This is Clancy Lost

If you spend a little time planning ahead, you don’t have to think about it, you can just get on with what needs done.  An hour of planning on Monday for the week can save you several hours wasted while you figure out what you needed to do each day.

In my writing, I’m a plotter not a pantser, but I recently tried pantsing a novel.  I got a good start on it, about 30K and then I had no idea where I was going.  I knew how it ended but I had no idea the route to get there.  I was completely lost.  Now, I’m having to map my course so I can finish my story’s journey. 

I may be a little over-zealous on this planning issue, as I am the person who had a 47-page itinerary for a ten-day road trip from coast to coast, but maybe that’s just how I need to operate in order to get to my destination.  Some of you may be able to jump in the car and drive with no plan, but I suspect most will fall in between the two extremes. 

I’m just suggesting that you consider planning.  See if it doesn’t make things run smoother.  If you aren’t already a planner, try it as an experiment.  Figure out the goal for the week, day by day, and follow it.  Let me know if it helps. 

My goals for the next year?

Writing – Do my regularly schedule blog posts on all three of my sites, write at least 4 hours a day/4 times a week with a goal of finishing two books during the year, and actively submitting.

Life – Do not take on any more commitments, schedule time at least once a month with my “best-y”, schedule my days so they are more productive, and ensure my writing time is held sacred.

 Go forth and plan…Be ‘Fictorious!’

 

Managed Expectations

Craft & Skills Dylan Blacquiere The Writing Life 6 Comments

One of the things that the contributors to this blog do, as part of a larger community of writers, is to set goals for the coming week that we broadcast to each other. The things that we need to do, or aspire to do, written there and stated plainly to the others in our writing group. The following week, we not only make new goals, but we account for our progress on the old ones. It’s been a way that we can keep in touch with the goals of others, and act as encouragement for those who need it, or to celebrate in each other’s accomplishments. Sometimes we’ve cheered as someone gets a publication, and sometimes it’s been something as simple as praising someone meeting their quota of words for the week. It’s been a great way to keep in touch with what people are doing, and what people are hoping to achieve.

In another sense, it’s a way to keep each other accountable to our goals, even if the only sanction is a sense of shame at not having lived up to the standard you’ve set for yourself. There have been times where I have cheerfully and earnestly placed a goal – say something modest, like writing a few thousand words – only to fail at it, and then have to face up to writing that accounting the following week.

Sometimes I write my rationalizations – oh, what the hell, excuses. I was busy. I did this instead. I did that instead. Et cetera. Sometimes – the times when I really didn’t have an excuse – I just didn’t say anything. A flat, inflectionless statement of the coming week’s goals, as though last week’s mark had been completely forgotten.

Inevitably that leads to a sense of frustration and failure. Wracking up week after week of missed bars is not a good feeling, and there have been times when I have felt that keen frustration that comes achingly close to just calling the whole thing off, taking a hiatus, not bothering to keep up with the accounting.

This is the wrong way to go about it. If you’re at all like me – someone who has a desire to write, but has a whole lot of life in the way of it – it’s important to keep those goals, and those reckonings. But maybe they have to be shifted. Maybe this won’t be the year that the blockbuster gets written or the screenplay gets done. But maybe, if you can block off some time, hit your small achievable goals, well, that well keep the whole thing from turning into an inescapable morass of shame and failure.

For me, I have my final licensing exam for my medical boards in May. I will not have time to do much writing in these last five months – I just wont. Afterward, we’ll see. In the meantime, what goals can I achieve? How can I do enough to justify to myself that I am a writer, as opposed to some hobbyist with an unused laptop in the corner? Maybe for the next five months it will be blog posts, and small submissions to journals that carry prose and poetry in the medical humanities field. Maybe token goals – a scene a week, or a couple of hundred words. Something that won’t detract from the very real need to study for this exam, but will make me feel as though I’m still actively engaged in this equally important passion. A managed expectation, if realistic and still aimed toward the future, can still be an important one, and one that keeps you on the path forward until you can raise the bar higher once again.

Starting Over: A Most Exquisite Agony

Craft & Skills Evan Braun Rewriting The Writing Life 6 Comments

Just about everyone who has ever used a computer knows the gut-wrenching pain of having to cope with lost data. Ever had your computer crash in the final stretch of writing an essay, and then discover that the file is unrecoverable? Ever spend hours on a piece of work and forget to save it before disaster strikes?

Of course you have.

But this post isn’t about data recovery, a subject on which I know very little (frankly, I would be well-advised to learn more). No, today’s post is about the exquisite agony of starting over.

Over the course of the last few years, fantasy wunderkind Brandon Sanderson has released chapters on his blog from his early unpublished manuscripts. On the one hand, this is an encouraging development, since it demonstrates so well the gradual accumulation of skill as time wears on. I find myself able to identify with Sanderson’s early writings. Hopefully, given more time, I, too, can become a writer of his caliber.

But the most interesting thing to me is the way that Sanderson openly talks about rewriting, and even re-rewriting, some of his manuscripts. In other words, he wrote it once-it wasn’t good enough. So he waited a while, then wrote it again-it still wasn’t good enough. He waited some more… then wrote it again! Finally, it was ready to see the light of day.

This kind of persistence is remarkable. As far as I can tell, it’s a necessary quality if one is to become a best-selling author.

In my editing career, I frequently come into contact with books that just aren’t good enough. It’s not that they’re outright bad (well, sometimes they are), but rather that editing alone isn’t enough to elevate them to “ready” status. The unfortunate reality is that the writer probably just doesn’t have chops to pull off the story-yet. My suggestion might be to give it some time, work on other projects, then come back a few years down the road and attempt the unthinkable: a page-one rewrite.

In other words, write the entire novel over again. From scratch.

If you’ve ever spent months-honestly, probably years-on your pet project, then the notion of starting over is truly daunting. Exhausting.

In my case, I have a 175,000-word novel sitting on my shelf. I wrote it the first time back when I was in high school-well, I wrote the first half before giving up. At the tender age of sixteen, I knew I wasn’t up to the challenge.

A few years later, I resurrected the project and tried turning it into a series of teleplays (television scripts). I wrote more than ten of them! But this format was impractical in the long run, so the project fizzled out. And almost stayed fizzled.

Then, after a long break, I jumped back into the fray last year and wrote the complete novel, which took nine months. In the spring, I trimmed it down some, bringing me to that polished 175,000-word version.

Except it’s not polished. Not really.

I’ve grown tremendously over the last few years. I was able to accomplish things in my most recent draft that my high school self would never have believed possible. But after receiving a lot of honest and well-intentioned feedback, I was forced to come to an uncomfortable conclusion: it’s still not ready. And in fact, like those editing clients I mentioned, editing still isn’t enough to get it where it needs to be to really come alive.

Indeed, I’ll have to start over. One more time.

But there’s no point in attempting another rewrite so quickly. Brandon Sanderson turned some of his flawed early works into best-selling gems, but they had to percolate for years.

So, just how long will I need to wait? Unfortunately, there’s no hard and fast rule, but I do know one thing: I will accumulate more skills and grow faster as a writer if I keep producing new work.

And there’s the rub. It’s not about waiting at all… it’s about pressing on.