On Writing
New Goals for a New Year
It’s December, and it’s the time of year when (in between all the holiday preparations) I try to take a look back at the past year and evaluate it in terms of my writing. What did I achieve? Where did I slide? And most important, where do I go from here? The past few years I’ve drawn up a list of goals for the coming year. Sometime in the past year, I’ve started using Evernote, which I find is an excellent tool for keeping track of notes like this, so I’m in the process of making up a new note for 2012 goals now.
As writer Holly Lisle says, though, don’t mistake your expectations for goals. Goals are things under your control; expectations rely on someone else. Finishing your novel draft is a goal: selling it is an expectation. That sale is not in your hands alone, although you may do everything in your power to work toward it. Be sure, when you are making your goal list for 2012, that you know the difference.
As a writer, I like to set short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals for the upcoming year. A long-term goal might be a large project that it might be difficult to set a definite deadline for; you might not really know how long it is going to take you, but you know you want it done before the end of another year. This might be completing a novel manuscript for submission, or a non-fiction book; it might also be an overall goal that you want to spread out over the year, like writing a certain number of new short stories or articles and submitting them. Maybe it’s collecting a certain number of rejection slips, or at least completing a certain number of submissions. Maybe it’s finishing all the half-written stories on your hard drive, once and for all. These are all good long-term goals.
Medium-term goals might be things that need to be done prior to starting your long-term goal, such as research, planning, or completion of a course. A good medium-term goal might be revising and editing a novel manuscript that is close to completion. It might encompass a project like podcasting or setting up a new website, that you want to complete in the near future and that you feel confident you can slot into a certain time-frame; things you know can be completed in a month or two. Usually your medium-term goals should be things that you plan to work on sooner rather than later in the year.
Short-term goals might be small projects with specific deadlines, like writing a story for a particular anthology or a timely article for a non-fiction market. They might also be objectives for improving your writing life, such as developing a new writing routine, writing every day, or blogging regularly. Short-term goals are often things that will, in some way, enhance or impact on your larger writing life. In looking over these examples, for instance, you can see how developing a habit of writing every day would help achieve that long-term goal of having a novel manuscript ready for submission.
It’s important in thinking about all these levels of goals to be realistic. If, right now, you sit down and write a couple of times a month, it’s not terribly realistic to expect that you will suddenly begin writing every day without fail. That kind of change takes training. It’s also not realistic for most of us to think that we can take on more than one or possibly two large, long-term goals for a single year. Here’s the hard fact: if you set unrealistic goals for yourself, you will harm your writing career more than help it. When you’re unable to achieve those unrealistic goals, you will be disappointed, frustrated, and probably end up writing even less. So make sure you set goals for yourself that you believe are realistic and achievable.
Ideally, you will think about these different types of writing goals and commit some of them to writing, and put them in a prominent place in your writing space. Refer to them often, and don’t be afraid to revise your goals as the year progresses. Maybe your short-term goals will turn out to be unrealistic after all, and you’ll have to make them a little easier to achieve. Maybe your medium-term goal will be reached sooner than you expected, and you can add a new one. Your goals don’t have to be set in stone. They are yours, to use whatever way helps you in your writing.
One final thought: if you’ve done goal-setting in the past, see if your goals have changed over time. Do you keep intending to edit the same novel manuscript, but you *never* seem to get around to it? Try taking it off your list. It could be that you don’t have confidence in the story any longer, or it doesn’t interest you anymore. Taking it off your list means it won’t be a disappointment when the end of the year rolls around and you still haven’t touched it. Keep your goals fresh, and you’ll be more likely to complete them.
Need a little help getting started? Check out our new goal-setting worksheet in the Toolbox!
About The Author
Sherry D. Ramsey is a speculative fiction writer, artist, web & indie publisher, creativity addict, Second Life denizen, and the creative force behind The Scriptorium. Her new collection of short stories, To Unimagined Shores, is available in print and ebook formats now! Visit Third Person Press for all the details and to order your copy.
Assess Your Novel-Writing Progress With These Four Questions
by Holly Lisle
You have to check the status of your novel now and again during the writing process–things do go wrong, after all. Consider the halfway mark a good point to take a breather, get out a notebook, and do a quick assessment of what you’ve done so far.
Mid-point assessment is NOT the time to start rewriting, though. Not even if you’ve gone tearing off in the wrong
direction somewhere down the line. Assessment is a thinking step (and a taking-notes step), not revision. Four questions will help you determine the course of your story, and whether you’re getting what you want from it so far or not. So, notebook in hand, ask yourself these questions:
First…are you having any fun?
I’m absolutely serious about this question. Writers in the middle of their novels frequently slide into this ‘grit-teeth-and-grind-forward’ mode that kills their spontaneity, makes writing miserable, and allows them to do huge
amounts of really bad work before stopping to realize they’ve gone off in the wrong direction. Writing is NOT the job that’s supposed to suck. Jamming ahead while hating life is as sign that your book went over a cliff somewhere and you missed the crash.
If your story is heading where it ought to be, you’ll be having fun—even if the writing is a lot of work. You’ll be excited about the twists and turns you’re coming up with, you’ll love your characters and what they’re doing, you’ll have to quell the urge to show off or read important passages to unsuspecting family members. This is the way you want the writing to feel. If you’ve taken a wrong turn, on the other hand, the writing is going to feel like drudgery—like punishment. If it ever feels like punishment, stop right away. Something has gone wrong with the story.
Second, does your Sentence still work?
(I talked about The Sentence, which is a tool you use to define your story, in a previous article.) If the book you’re writing still fits the concepts, characters, and twist in your Sentence, go on to the next question.
If it doesn’t, you’re either going to have to figure out how to make the book fit The Sentence, or how to rewrite The Sentence to fit the book. If you’re still passionate about your original concepts and characters, figure out where you’ve gone wrong in the story. If you love your new direction, figure out via The Sentence what these changes you’ve made will mean to your bigger picture.
Third, are your characters the people you want them to be?
They don’t have to be carrying out your orders like little clockwork automatons, but they do need to be working, not
sitting around the pool drinking tea and sneering at you whenever you try to put them into a scene. There are ways of
dealing with problem characters—but first, you have to recognize that you have a problem, and that they’re it.
Finally, how’s your plot holding up?
My students generally use my plot card technique—plot cards allow you to be flexible, to move things around, to toss cards that no longer lie along the path your story is taking. But you shouldn’t have to toss them all. And every plot card should make sense in relation to every other plot card, and the whole should add up to a complete story. If they don’t—if your book has somehow become a series of unrelated incidents, it’s time to go back to plot cards and figure out what you’ve missed, and how to fit it in.
At this point, you’re probably wondering why you don’t just go ahead and make the changes you see you’re going to have to make. The answer is simple, though a bit strange.
You’re not finished yet, and any revisions you do halfway through may have to be tossed when the second half of the story takes an unexpected turn.
For now, mark out problem areas, figure out workable fixes you can make when you’re done, and then get back to writing, knowing that everything is fixable. Just not yet fixed.
You can do this.
About The Author: Holly Lisle, full-time novelist and author of more than 30 published novels, teaches you how to write a book in How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers. You can download three free course modules today and receive her free writing tips right now at http://HowToThinkSideways.com .
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Write Strategy: Think, Believe, Attack
by Shery Ma Belle Arietta Russ
Think of writing like karate…it’s about DISCIPLINE.
Writing, like other forms of art, work or talent, requires discipline. It won’t ever be enough that you say to yourself that you are a writer. Only when you write and write with discipline can you call yourself one. Before you can earn a black belt in karate, you have to dedicate yourself, practice and instill discipline in yourself to learn the moves and techniques.
The same goes for writing. Don’t just read books. Devour them. Ray Bradbury, author of Zen in the Art of Writing, suggests books of essays, poetry, short stories, novels and even comic strips. Not only does he suggest that you read authors who write the way you hope to write, but “also read those who do not think as you think or write as you want to write, and so be stimulated in directions you might not take for many years.” He continues, “don’t let the snobbery of others prevent you from reading Kipling, say, while no one else is reading him.”
Learn to differentiate between good writing and bad writing. Make time to write. Write even though you’re in a bad mood. Put yourself in a routine. Integrate writing into your life. The goal is not to make writing dominate your life, but to make it fit in your life. Julia Cameron, in her book The Right to Write, sums it best: “Rather than being a private affair cordoned off from life as the rest of the world lives it, writing might profitably be seen as an activity best embedded in life, not divorced from it.”
Believe that EVERYONE HAS A STORY — including you.
Extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. As a writer, your job is to capture as many of these things and write them down, weave stories, and create characters that jump out of the pages of your notebook. Don’t let anything escape your writer’s eye, not even the way the old man tries to subtly pick his nose or the way an old lady fluffs her hair in a diner. What you can’t use today, you can use tomorrow. Store these in your memory or jot them down in your notebook.
Jump in the middle of the fray. Be in the circle, not outside it. Don’t be content being a mere spectator. Take a bite of everything life dishes out. Ray Bradbury wrote, “Tom Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava. Dickens dined at a different table every hour of his life. Moliere, tasting society, turned to pick up his scalpel, as did Pope and Shaw. Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.”
Attack writing with PASSION.
The kind of writing you produce will oftentimes reflect the current state of your emotions. Be indifferent and your writing will be indifferent. Be cheerful and watch the words dance across your page.
Whenever you sit down to write, put your heart and soul in it. Write with passion. Write as if you won’t live tomorrow. In her book, Writing the Wave, Elizabeth Ayres wrote: “There’s one thing your writing must have to be any good at all. It must have you. Your soul, your self, your heart, your guts, your voice — you must be on that page. In the end, you can’t make the magic happen for your reader. You can only allow the miracle of ‘being one with’ to take place. So dare to be you. Dare to reveal yourself. Be honest, be open, be true…If you areScience Articles, everything else will fall into place.”
About the Author: Shery is the creator of WriteSparks! – a software that generates over 10 *million* Story Sparkers for Writers. Download WriteSparks! Lite for free – http://writesparks.com
Oh No! A Bad Book Review! Have No Fear, It’s Not The End
by Laura Hickey
You’ve just been notified a review of your book has been posted. You’re all excited and can’t wait to see what has been written. You’re clicking onto your book’s page when…Oh no! They hated your book! This bad review is going to turn away customers from buying your book. Wait! This isn’t the end of the world. Here’s 3 tips to deal when you get a bad review.
1. You can’t please everyone!
Example: One of my favorite authors is a bestseller but the author didn’t receive such hot customer reviews.
Another example: I was reading some book reviews and one of the books had one of the worst ratings ever. I clicked the link with curiosity to find over 20 customers had reviewed the book and loved it. In life, you can’t please everyone. Will a bad review discourage future customers? On to my next tip.
2. A bad review doesn’t have to mean bad profit.
Not all customers look at a bad review as their only guide to buying. In fact, if your review is so awful, they may even buy the book to see if it’s really as bad as the reviewer rated it. There’s the saying that curiosity killed the cat, curiosity in this case could help you. Customers also realize that everyone has different tastes. Maybe the reviewer didn’t like your book, but who’s to say someone different won’t? It may be bad publicity, but none the less it may help you. In fact, sometimes a customer may have read the bad review but only remembers your name and or the book’s title.
3. If you’re getting more than one bad review.
It’s understandable if you’re disappointed. It’s expected, but do not allow yourself to become discouraged. If you’ve published an e-book and can easily edit your work, bad reviews can actually help your writing. Now don’t go crazy and change everything! But if reviews are constantly pin pointing on one certain area, review your work and see if and how you could improve it. I know reviewing repeatedly can be hurtful but if it can help your e-book, isn’t it worth considering? Also, don’t start picking apart reviews right away, give yourself time to go over them. Picking apart your reviews the moment you receive them could prove fatal to your self esteem.
About the Author: Free writing reprint articles available in Espanol and Italiano. Read more articles written by Ms. Laura Hickey and her children’s book Mysterious Chills and Thrills E-book for Kids. Ten Short Stories to Tickle the Imagination. “Spooky” “Awesome” “Unpredictable” Isn’t it time you entered the world where shadows lurk and each page turn could be your doom… http://www.laurahickey.com
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