Rethinking Writing Goals for 2024

Hello 2024! Time goes so quickly–it feels like less than a year has gone by since I posted a reflection about my 2022 writing goals. Looking back now, it appears I never actually made a post about my 2023 writing goals, but they were essentially a repeat of those from 2022.

It feels like a year should feel longer than it does. I’m still writing 2023 at the top of documents. Now January is nearly half over! But here we are. It’s time to think about what writing might look like for me in this last year of the quarter-century.

I missed a post. Two weeks ago, I was meant to write a blog post, and for the first time since I began in December 2018, I didn’t post when I planned to. I was sick (again! With the flu this time, after a mercifully brief bout of covid earlier in the month). I was spending time with family. And the day I’d planned to post, it came and went. I decided to let it go, and so here I am, four weeks after my last post, returned to Norway, teaching again. I don’t plan to stop blogging. Welcome to another year of Words Like Trees.

Even after I came down with covid, we were able to do some good activities. Although I was isolating in the house, my husband, mother-in-law, and I went out for a lovely walk along these bluffs, called in Billings “the Rims.”

But the attitude that made me miss what would have been the final post of 2023 I think is something I need to examine. I think it’s bigger than missing one blog post. I confess that, when I’ve been thinking about writing goals for 2024, the feeling I’ve been having has been, I’d like to dial things back. After three years of quite intense goals, the feeling in me now is that I need some greater ease, and some greater freedom to focus my writing work differently.

The question of time

Goal for 2022 and 2023: 31025 total minutes = 517 hours and 5 minutes, an average of 85 minutes per day
Recorded in 2022: 35360 total minutes = 589 hours and 20 minutes, an average of ~97 minutes per day
Recorded in 2023: 44295 total minutes = 738 hours and 15 minutes, an average of ~121 minutes per day

During 2022 and 2023, I had a goal of devoting 85 minutes of time every day to writing. I began in 2022 with one hour early in the morning and then tried to do a bit more in the afternoons after work; the following school year, I woke up 15 minutes earlier and so spent 75 minutes most weekday mornings. Usually my plans to write in the afternoons didn’t happen, but on weekends I was often able to spend more time. During summer 2023, I was taking a nature-writing workshop to which I devoted a great deal of time.

*Flying from Billings to Minneapolis once I had again tested negative for covid–I was really captivated by this so-well-defined cloud shadow.*

This school year, though, our class schedule shifted, so classes began 15 minutes earlier. I didn’t feel prepared to wake up a further 15 minutes earlier, and so I have been having trouble these last few months meeting that time goal. There was something else too I noticed in myself: when working on a writing project, my best work unfortunately doesn’t happen in 60-minute bursts. I find that it takes me a fair amount of time at the beginning of a writing session to get into a project. The result is that I generally do work I feel happier with when I can devote uninterrupted time, when I can enter the mental space of the project. Unfortunately, right now, my schedule makes that difficult. Even on weekends it isn’t always possible. What I found in the latter part of this year was that the benchmark of 85 minutes per day was bringing me more feelings of guilt and frustration than it was joy and accomplishment.

We had a wonderful time visiting friends, family, and former students in Minneapolis. Out on a walk with a friend we had not seen for a year, we stepped out tentatively onto a frozen lake. I photographed these oak leaves trapped in ice. Norway is beautiful, but so is Minnesota. Each place in its own way.

How am I changing things for 2024?

I originally created these writing goals as a way to motivate myself, as a way to sustain and grow a daily habit. Over the years, I credit them absolutely with helping me make my writing part of my daily practice.

But I think that after three years of setting specific goals and measuring my work against them, that I have built a habit. I think that habit will be sustained even if I don’t have a specific benchmark against which I am measuring myself. I also think that a more relaxed time goal will encourage me to make ultimately more strategic decisions about how I spend my time, and perhaps seek out more of those times when I can devote myself to writing for a longer session and not force myself to work when I don’t have long and probably won’t move forward in the way I hope. That is, perhaps being more open will let me listen more acutely to what is the best thing for me to do in the moment, rather than holding myself to a relatively abstract goal. I hope too that it will lead to fewer situations where I am feeling guilty or off-track.

*On our way in to a coffee shop in White Bear Lake, Minnesota to meet friends, we found this hilarious local art installation.*

So, here is the main goal for 2024: still measuring time, but without a daily (or a yearly) “finish line”:

Goal statement: Each day of 2024, I will log my writing time. Instead of a daily number of minutes, I will simply aim to devote good time to my writing and keep track here of what I have done.

I’ve update my Excel spreadsheet. I’m still totaling my time spent, but I have removed the meticulously-coded conditional formatting columns that turned red when I was behind my goal and green when I was ahead. I’m just logging the time I spend, so I can look back later. And so far, almost two weeks into the year, I’m feeling good. I do think I feel freer than I did last year. I think it likely will mean that I will spend less time overall, but I’m hoping the time I do spend will feel more productive and positive. I hope I will be able to hold onto the real feelings of accomplishment and progress that these goals give me, without some of the stress.

From Minneapolis, we drove south to western Wisconsin where we spent three good days with my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew. Then, it was on to central Wisconsin with my parents and Gordi the Corgi. Gordi is aging. He has had some health problems recently. It was so good to see him and play a few games of ball.

Pausing on the short stories

For the last few years, I have been focusing on writing a number of short stories, and these have been wonderful and have taught me a great deal. But I am also working on a novel, one I’ve written about here on Words Like Trees occasionally over the years. Actually, I’ve been working on this novel for some time, but fairly sporadically, and since the beginning of this school year I have been devoting most of my writing time to it rather than to short stories.

I do have another goal for 2024, which is to complete a full draft of the novel.

I still want to be open with myself. Maybe I will do a short story at some point this year, or maybe I will return to revise one of the stories I began in 2023 but have not completed. But my focus is on this novel, which I am writing slowly, and rewriting as I go, and probably being too much of a perfectionist about it all, but that will be something I’ll work out as I go. And that is another reason why I missed the blog post two weeks ago–the writing time I was doing, I was devoting to the novel. I couldn’t pull myself away. And I think that is an impulse I should cultivate, to be really immersed in a project.

A family science project–at the college where my mom teaches, we took a look at sauerkraut and yogurt under the microscope to try to find some of the microorganisms involved in fermentation. Wow! It was fascinating to see these little groups and chains of microbes. I found this diagram helpful–it looks like we were mostly seeing cocci in various configurations.

Sending out work

I am still going to try to send out submissions, for short stories that haven’t yet been published, or poems, or potentially novel query letters, although I won’t get ahead of myself on that. I’m dialing back from 16 per month to the very slightly reduced 15 per month. What can I say… it’s a more base-10 number and felt right when I made the decision about goals last week. Two weeks into January, though, I have not yet sent out anything, so we will see how well I meet that goal. As with time, I am going to try to be less rigid this year.

Heading forward

I’m not entirely sure how these changes in my goal-setting will impact writing in my life. I hope the impact will be positive, one that brings me growth and positivity and brings me closer to the kind of writing I want to be part of my life. But as each year before, this is an experiment. If I decide later I want to bring back a more structured time goal, I will, and that’s okay, and if I end up writing less this year, that is also okay. What I know is, writing is a passion. I’ll keep pursuing it. And I also value balance, and I will pursue that too.

*Out for an afternoon walk (although it was already dusk) back in Norway.*

I’m busy with teaching again. This term, I’m beginning with Manuel Puig’s captivating, sad, and very tender novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, along with a few non-literary units in my language arts classes–political cartoons by Paresh Nath, and a series of provocative and fascinating photo-collages by Uğur Gallenkuş.

Best wishes for the new year,
Jimmy