Achieve Your Writing Goals One Step at a Time

What are your writing goals? Many fiction writers would simply answer, "to be published." That is, after all, the number one reason why we struggled through first drafts, re-writes, submissions, and rejections. If it were only for our own purposes, we would jot down a note or two in a journal and call it a day. But, since publication is the ultimate goal, you have to come up with a plan to achieve it.

Daily Word Count

Perhaps the most obvious way to achieve your writing goals is to make sure you write. Sounds simple, but it can really become a problem. Usually, fiction writers have a life outside of writing; they have to pay the bills after all. Writing can often be shuffled to the bottom of the pile under work, kids, spouse, housework, and vapid sitcoms.

Give yourself a daily word count goal and stick to it. Even if it is just five hundred or one thousand words, you have to make that goal.

Project Timeline

Once you have a writing project in your brain, you should make yourself a project timeline. It is often showed in scientific studies that working with a deadline increases the assurance that a job actually will be done. It's not a sin to structure your creative endeavors. You are not somehow denying the muse if you treat your novel like a job.

Keep track of how many days you have left to complete your goal. Compute how many words you have to write each day to do it. And then stick to your deadline.

Scheduled Editing

Just like you might have to schedule writing, you should schedule editing as well. Editing is often the least favorite thing for a fiction writer to do. It is often frustrating and sometimes boring, once you get down to the rules of comma usage and such. But it has to get done if you are going to achieve your writing, and publishing, goals.

Research

Writing is not all about writing, after all. You have to find agents to proposition, and publishing houses to submit to. Even if you do not have any finished product yet, you should make a goal to research a certain number of possible markets each week or month.

Submission Goals