Setting Writing Goals

Can productivity strategies help with writing?

Dear Sonal,

First of all, I love your instagram! It makes me feel so much better about all the ‘things I do instead of writing.’

But right now, I really want to do some writing this summer, and I’m trying to figure out some goals to help motivate me. Have any advice for me? Do you make writing goals?

Sincerely,
I Should Be Writing

Dear I Should Be Writing,

Thank you for your compliment about my instagram, but given that I post so many of the things I did instead of writing, are you sure I’m the right person to ask about, like, actually writing?

I’m kidding, of course. This wouldn’t be much of an advice column if I wrote about the things I did well.

And for the majority of my writing life, sitting my butt down to actually write has been my biggest struggle. I wrote a little about this when I talked about writing routines, but goal setting is one of those things that a lot of writers try as a way of getting themselves through the hard bits—whether it's the mucky middle, or revision, or just starting at all—and then it kinda sorta works some of the time, but also it gets weird.

Goal setting is one of those productivity advice things that writers turn to as strategy for actually writing. It sounds perfectly reasonable and logical and sure, it may work well for some writers sometimes, but for me personally, a lot of the common productivity advice is pretty hit and miss. This is in part due to ADHD, since a daily routine—especially a self-motivated daily routine—is something I am hilariously terrible at, but also in part because writing is not like drinking eight cups of water a day. It’s not a matter of just making yourself do it and voila, you have a story.

On the other hand, it is kind of a matter of making yourself do it.

To put it less confusingly, each day that you sit down to write is not going to be identical to the day before. There are days when everything is in flow and the words come easily. There are days when you're lucky to get out a sentence. This is not a failure on the part of the writer; it's simply the nature of the thing, and that has to be accounted for in any kind of writing-related goal setting. You aren't going to fix that big plot hole on Tuesday at 3pm because you scheduled it. But maybe you can doodle around for an hour on that day and see what happens. Maybe the best thing to do with that time is to read and see if that helps you. Maybe take a walk. Maybe take a nap.

That said, I’ve become slightly better about writing goals, in large part due to the work I’ve done with Jill Margo, who I chatted with in my last column, and I promise that I’m not a paid shill for Jill because let’s face it, Jill cannot afford what I want to be paid, but really, who can?

The first thing I discovered in our work was how often people—meaning me—use goal setting as something aspirational, and then as something to beat themselves over their head with when they fail to meet said aspirational goal. Just because I want to write a short story a month doesn't mean I'm going to. Maybe I get halfway through a story and then draw a blank. Maybe I hit a point where I genuinely need to do research and not convince myself I do in order to avoid writing. Maybe the short story keeps growing longer and longer until it's starting to seem more novel-like. But more often, it’s that maybe a whole lotta Life happens between sick children and then catching their viruses and getting sick and the cat suddenly needs a series of emergency trips to the vets and trying to manage this through a zillion activities and recitals and play dates and birthday parties and special theme days at school leaves me too zonked to think.

Setting writing goals is usually done wearing rose-coloured glasses—I can totally write 1,000 words today, that’s easy—but then we try to enact these goals in the cold light of day, and the reality of our lives sets in, and we feel bad when we couldn’t make what we falsely believed to be a realistic writing goal work.

But you can't just set goals in a fit of optimism and then grimly try to stick to them while Life implodes, and there’s no sense in feeling bad that we didn't reach an entirely arbitrary goal that looked good on paper, but in no way resembled our real life.

Sure, I can’t predict every emergency that pops up (like, WTF cat, four vet trips in two weeks??) but I know that a certain amount of my brain energy is going towards child management, and that some points of the year, child management is going to use up a lot more brain than other times.

Being realistic instead of aspirational means both accounting for what our life actually looks like, and not what we wish it looked like. Do I wish someone else around here (*cough* *cough*) would take over all the summer camp sign-ups and logistics? Of course. Will this actually happen? Unlikely.

There’s also understanding how we individually respond to different times of year. As I write this, it’s summer. Some people are fantastically productive in summer, others get into a lazy summer brain mode. Some of us are on very different schedules during the summer which makes it tricky to fit in anything new, and sometimes a new schedule makes it easier. Some of us are different from summer to summer. But overall…. maybe it’s not a writing goals summer, but more of a reading in a lawn chair summer.

The other thing is remembering that different stages of your creative work are going to need different aims, and some of these will be less predictable than others.

When I was on the final revision draft of my novel, when there were very few big changes but instead a lot of tweaky sentence-level stuff... that was somewhat predictable. I could expect to manage some number of words per day, or that I would finish a certain number of scenes per week.

But right now, when I am in the early, exploratory stage of a short story collection... not so much. I could control how much time I spent on the writing, or how many words I'd want to put down on the page per day, but not how far I’m going to get with a particular story. Am I halfway through this story or still faffing about in Act One, or is this all garbage that I’m going to throw out tomorrow? Who can tell? How can I possibly set a deadline for when I’m going to finish the collection?

Sure, you can plan, you can outline, you can prep... but stories are funny and sometimes want to go somewhere else. So if you want some specific writing goal to help you stay on track--you need to account for that. Keep things very loose in terms of progress in the early days of a project. Maybe it’s just that you sit down twice a week and spend a hour or so doing something.

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In the past, I'd come to goal setting thinking: well, if I stopped watching garbage TV, I could easily write 1,000 words a day. Heck, I've done NaNoWriMo when I had to do almost 2,000 words per day, surely this is a very reasonable goal. And I'd start well, but then promptly skip a day, thinking I can do a little more for the next few days to catch up, and then I’d skip a few more days and then I’d tell myself, never mind catching up, the past doesn’t matter, you can just pick up doing 1,000 words a day from here and keep going and that’ll be good enough, and then I'd skip all the days.

As much as I think I can write instead of watching garbage television... at the end of the day, I'm often zonked and need a fair chunk of time with my brain on neutral. As much as I think I can consistently write 1,000 words a day, history has shown otherwise... I can easily do it on days that go well, but not so much on those busy days where I'm dealing with a dozen different things and my brain isn't having it. Plus the last time I did NaNoWriMo was before I had kids.

It’s entirely unrealistic to set a goal that requires you to be doing something productive every minute of the day. Everyone needs downtime… especially writers and other creative people. We need that time to daydream or at least let our brains go on idle.

If your life right now is so completely full that the only way to write is to have no downtime at all…. you are setting yourself up for failure. You’re going to have to figure out what you can stop doing so that you can write. Or at least, rest. You deserve rest.

What is somewhat more effective for me is to set the goal as something ridiculously small and short-term, something I can't easily fail at. 100 words a day for a month. One hour of writing per week for a season.

The difficult part of this is that I hate setting tiny goals. They feel so small and unworthy of being a real goal, which is probably internalized capitalist bullshit of some kind.

But ultimately, it feels way better to succeed regularly at something teeny-tiny that I can exceed on good days and still manage on most of the rough days, than it feels to fail at something medium-sized two days in and then quit and feel shitty about failing. And feeling good about succeeding at something is way more motivating than failure; after all, the dopamine hit your brain gets from completing something on the checklist doesn't care how much internalized capitalism went into setting the goal.

And, as I once heard Annabel Lyon say, if you write 100 words a day every day for two years, you will have a novel. Will I, personally, be able to stick to any daily habit for two years? No, of course not, but the point is, the pathetically tiny goals you can actually succeed at will add up to something bigger at lot faster than the impressively large goals you fail to achieve.

For this summer, I have a lot of things I want to work on, and so rather than pick one or two and setting a reasonable goal accordingly, I’m giving myself a menu of things to select from whenever I sit down to write, and I’m not giving myself any particular goal on how many times I’m going to write every week, but I am tracking it on a weekly plan so that I can easily see if it’s been a long time since I’ve written or not. This way, I can fuck off and enjoy a lazy summer brain whenever I want to, but not lose track of time.

Will this work? I have no idea, but it feels good right now, certainly much more fun than being forced to choose something and looking longingly back at all the things I left behind. When it stops feeling good, I can switch it up to something else.

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Most of all, remember that Life happens. Most of us can’t just ignore any tricksy Life issues on the assumption that other people will magically take care of it without our involvement, and Life takes up time and energy that therefore will not go to writing. Sure, having had written tends to give us some energy back, but if we’re drained, we need to rest. There’s no need to force a goal just because it’s a goal.

Instead, you can change and shift goals whenever you want to or need to. You can adjust if it turns out to be still more aspirational than realistic. You can be as creative as you like in how you set a goal. Why make it dreary when you can make it fun?

You're not engraving these goals into granite, and even if you were, the worst that can happen if you change them around is that you're out a little bit of granite, and clearly you can spare the granite if you’re using it to carve out some summer writing goals.

But in any case, have a wonderful summer.

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Readers, do you set writing goals? Do you set writing goals and fail to keep them? Do you actually succeed with them? Do you have any goals right now? Please share in the comments below.