2022 Writing Goals Review

For the last two years, I have been setting strategic writing goals for myself to help me keep moving in the direction I want to go. My writing goals in 2021 helped me increase productivity and direct my energies towards the parts of my writing work that felt most important. In 2022, I updated my goals to push myself further. As the year winds down, let’s take a moment to review.

I’m writing today from Billings, Montana, where we are visiting my husband’s parents. This is the place where I first began Words Like Trees in December 2018. Have I really been blogging here for four years? This is the 26th and final post of 2022. Here we go!

Goal #1: Writing Time

In 2022, I upped my daily writing time from 55 to 85 minutes. I typically write for about an hour in the morning before work. My plan, then, was to add a short session later in the day.

I set up a spreadsheet to track my daily progress with a lot of fun formulas. Actually, I spent a lot of time finagling with these formulas to make the math happen automatically. For each date on the calendar, the spreadsheet calculated my total time goal for the day, month, and year and compared it with how many minutes I actually spent. In these comparison columns, I used conditional formatting to gauge how far ahead of or behind my goal I was.

How did it go? Well, ultimately, really well. Although on a daily basis, I often fell short of 85 minutes, looking on the more average scales of months or the whole year, the 85-minutes-per-day goal really increased my total writing time.

You can see in the excerpt from my spreadsheet above that, on many days, I was behind. This clip here is from the summer, when I had hoped to have a lot of extra time to write. As it happened, I didn’t find it any easier during the summer than during the busy school year! During school, I often found myself unable to fit in any afternoon or evening writing sessions due to lesson planning, grading, or just tiredness. In those times, I would try to make up the rest of my goal on the weekends.

I am writing this post on the morning of December 18, as I half-watch the World Cup final with family. As of right now, my total minutes of writing for the year are 34,310. This comes out to about 572 hours, or 71 eight-hour working days, about 14 five-day working weeks. Wow! That feels like a lot! I feel really good about this, given how busy school normally keeps me.

Goals #2 and #3: Finished Pieces

I set an ambitious goal for completing writing pieces this year. I had hoped to complete 12 short fiction pieces and a second draft of a novel. In contrast to my first goal of time spent on writing, on both of these goals I definitely fell short.

I planned to write six short stories of 2000-6000 words and six flash pieces of under 1000 words. I tracked when I began each piece, when I had a complete draft, and when I had a draft I felt ready to send out.

Something that I was hoping to achieve with this goal was keeping myself from dithering too much with a piece, to keep tinkering and hemming and hawing. I wanted to let myself say, this is good enough, and move on to the next piece.

Although early in the year I was reasonably on track, as the year continued, I found that I was not able to keep up the pace. Here at the end of the year, as of today, I am ending up with eight pieces, four short stories and four flash pieces that I am now sending out. I have two pieces currently in the works as well.

Something that changed this year that caused me to slow down, and I think in a really good way, was connecting with my writing group. Getting feedback from my writing group made it difficult to meet my self-set deadlines as I waited to send the piece in to the group for feedback, then worked on revisions. But this was undoubtedly worthy it–the feedback from the group has helped me improve my work significantly. I feel really grateful to be connected with them.

I noticed too that the pressure to complete a piece by the end of a particular month made me rush, perhaps cut corners I should not have. I feel good about the balance I have ended up striking.

The novel has unfortunately not made much progress this year. Perhaps in 2023 I’ll make this more of a priority. So it goes.

Goal #4: Submissions

I kept this goal unchanged from 2021. My goal was to send out at least 16 submissions each month, for a yearly total of 192.

Although during a couple of months I have finished late (in the first few days of the new month), I am on track to complete this goal by the end of the year. Sometimes this has meant scrambling at the end of the month to send things out.

Reflections

I feel really good about what I’ve accomplished this year, and honestly, I think I’m going to plan to keep a really similar set of goals in 2023. Perhaps I’ll reduce my goal for short pieces to write, to allow myself to take a more reasonable pace, but I think these goals have pulled me in the right directions. Setting goals like these keep me focused, keep me engaged, and help me measure what I’m doing.

As I’ve been writing this post this morning, I feel a bit unfocused. I’m still somewhat jetlagged, and as the World Cup Final keeps getting more exciting, I’m perhaps not able to be as reflective as I would like to be. But that’s alright. I’ll keep going. I’m meeting with my writing group later today to talk about one of my stories, and we will see how that goes.

Best wishes for the holiday season. I’ll be in Wisconsin later this week for Christmas, and then early in the new year I will head back to Norway. My next post will be on the first day of the new year. I also have some exciting news coming up, but I’ll wait until next post.

Wishing you well, and happy writing,
Jimmy