Goals Worth Setting: How to Achieve the Things You Want
Goals Worth Setting
Every year at NaNoWriMo time, there are threads and articles about How To Do It.
How to Write Your Book.
The Resources Available to NaNo Winners will Change Your Life. (celebration emoji! exclamation point emoji!)
Writers, after attempting to put pen to paper (or finger tip to key), can become consumed with doubts about their own work.
Is it working?
Are my characters interesting?
Am I hitting the word count?
And most importantly – is this high-powered output worth anything?
These concerns plague anyone attempting to write 50k words in November. Every year, writers of all kinds decide this is the year.
This is when they’re going to do it.
They’ll write for two days and fizzle out.
I’ve been there. My second NaNo, after a very fruitful first year, ended the same way.
My issue, and what I imagine the same issue many others face, is that the goal of a 50k word book is not something we want to obtain. The goals aren’t worth setting if we don’t want the outcome.
If the goal is anything other than to “write 50k words,” then the 50k words are a barrier to the thing you really want. You may really want to get an agent, land a multi-book deal, and become rich and famous. Nothing in that sequence of events suggests you are a writer.
You have to want to write the novel. Then revise the novel. Then potentially burn the novel and start over. Then find an agent. Then the rest unfolds.
“You have to want to write the novel.”
Set the goals you want to achieve.
Setting the right goal helps you reach the goal. If the goal is “becoming rich and famous,” then there are much easier paths to trying your hand at becoming wealthy off the internet. You don’t have to agonize over character development and plot pacing to pursue internet-based work in other fields.
Set the goals you want to achieve. They can stack and be intertwined. I don’t just want to be a writer, after all. I want to be a successful writer, but at the end of the day, I want to be successful for putting in the hours over word choice and syntax. That’s where I’m willing to bank my time.
