Five Months In: a Writing Goals Update

As the end of May approaches, I have been springing ahead to try to meet my monthly writing goals. I set these goals at the beginning of the year in order to keep myself making progress on my writing journey. I posted an update in January, but the months have been racing by and it is time that I checked in again. Have I met my goals? What have I learned? What is still to come?

Why set specific goals?

Writing, at least as I do it, is a largely individual pursuit. I answer only to myself. In my years of working towards my writing ambitions, I have become intimately acquainted with how easy it can be to lose focus, to dither sometimes for months in indecision. In recent years, I have been working to add some mode of structure to my writing work to help me make the progress I want.

The first of these structures, and still the foundation of everything I do, is the daily writing habit that I began last year. I made a promise myself to complete each day one 55-minute writing session (as a ritual accompanied by a pot of tea). One per day is my current norm. Sometimes if I’m lucky, on a weekend or vacation day, I’ll get two. Rarely three. Although 55 minutes alone is not large, this comes to about six and a half hours per week. In a year, that makes 334 hours, and assuming an eight-hour workday, it makes 42 workdays per year if writing were my job. I feel good about that.

But 55 minutes doing what? I have noticed often enough that those minutes slip away so easily, into planning, research or revising, into staring mindlessly at space–of course there are many pieces to the full list of tasks of writing, certainly many more than just putting words onto a page. But I recognized in myself a subtle procrastination–I told myself that I was working on my writing, but I was too often avoiding the most important piece.

My solution was a specific goal, which I had trialed a few times in the past (most pointedly during NaNoWriMo in November 2020). Setting specific, measurable goals allowed me to direct my efforts towards particular elements of writing that I wanted to promote. I set up these three SMART goals in December 2020 and set to work. Let’s see how it has gone.

Word Count

Goal Statement: I will draft at least 7,000 words per month, January-December of 2021 (for a yearly total of 84,000).

Cat’s out of the bag–I am working on a novel. All year I have been making progress on it, chipping away, sometimes slower or faster, but I think having a large piece of writing to work on has made the word count goal go well, better than during times of focus on short stories with all their stopping and starting and planning for each one.

I’ve successfully reached my 7000-words-per-month benchmark every month, and in a couple of cases exceeded it significantly. Here are the numbers:

Month	Total words
January	8,668
February	7,666
March	15,650
April	21,662
May (as of the 28th)	8,476
Running total for the year	62,122

Reflections

I feel really encouraged by these numbers. I am certain that this is already significantly more than I was writing in previous years, and I absolutely credit the goal with spurring me on. Actually, this current month of May has been particularly challenging–I spent about two solid weeks the first part of the month revising a short story, none of which I counted towards my word count goal. Since I finished that interlude and have returned to novel drafting, I have had my eye on those numbers. I reached the goal just the other day with a relieved sigh.

But the reflections I made in January to the opposite effect still hold true: I think that in trying to achieve a certain word count goal, I am more apt to simply splat ideas onto a page without regard for their strength. I’ll rework this in the editing, I say, and perhaps this is ultimately a good strategy (i.e. the “shitty first draft”), but it will undoubtedly make for a lot more work later on. I am sure I will be able to hone the flood of words into something I am happy with, yet when I reread the first strokes of this manuscript, written in the last months of 2020, compared with the much larger volume I have put down in 2021, I worry somewhat that a certain insightful creativity may be being lost: will I think to rework the material in innovative ways, or will I rather work with the material primarily in the form I find it, thus leading to an overall more humdrum final novel?

Yet the rapid drafting has also made me aware of weaknesses in my original formulation of the story–as I have struggled to write a section, or looked back at what I have produced and realized the corner into which I have written my characters–I have rewritten a particular large section of the manuscript two full times when I recognized something in my idea that was not working, and these realizations may have taken me far longer to detect otherwise.

There is, of course, also a continuing question about what precisely counts as words. I am still not counting this blog, and I am not, at least not officially, counting editing. But what about the full rewrites that I referred to above? Here is the full table of records from April:

In my notes in the righthand column, it’s clear that two of my largest writing days for the month were largely repurposed words taken from an excised section of the draft. And I counted them, because I did not copy them into the document but rather retyped them individually, making small modifications as I went.

But I should not quibble. I have accomplished a lot. I am feeling really good.

Submissions

Goal statement: Each month of 2021, I will send out at least 16 submissions or queries (for a yearly total of at least 192).

I have successfully kept pace here too, though I have really only scraped by, most months with only 16 submissions. Usually in the last few days of the month, I am searching for which last few to add. Here are the specific totals:

Month	Total submissions
January	18
February	16
March	16
April	17
May (as of the 28th)	16
Running total for the year	83

I am skewing heavily still towards short story submissions with only a handful of halfhearted novel queries. I think this has to do both with the relative ease of short story submissions–one of these, including the time it takes to find an open market that I want to submit to, to assemble the cover letter, and to complete the actual file uploading, usually takes me around 20 minutes; one novel query often takes me more than an hour, although perhaps I need to get more efficient at these too.

Publications

Goal statement: By the end of 2021, I will place three more stories in literary magazines.				

This goal was the wildcard, the one I really questioned whether I should try for, because it is ultimately only partially in my control. Yet it is a central piece of this writing journey for me. I am not writing only for myself. I am writing to reach others, and I want to keep my sights on that aspect of my journey.

I’m pleased to say that for this update, the column is not empty. In February I found out that a story I had written a year and a half ago is going to be published sometime this summer. I have added it with glee to my spreadsheet!

Will I reach my publication goal? We’ll see. I’m certainly on track to send out more submissions this year than I did the last.

Into June

I have seven months of these writing goals to go. The question remains if these are the best measures of my progress. Is there a way to quantify revising that would not cause me to rush the process? Should I be tracking something else? For now, I’ll keep writing day by day and month by month. Seeing the progress I have made so far, it keeps me motivated.

How is your writing going? What are you working on? What do you feel about goal setting? What has helped you build the kind of writing habit that feels right for you?

Thanks for stopping by and reading. Best wishes for the week to come,
Jimmy