How To Set Achievable Writing Targets
Promising and delivering your novel to yourself
Everyone sets targets when they write, whether consciously or subconsciously and its completely natural. But how do you keep hitting them and improve them? In time, writing becomes a natural rhythm but I know from experience that it doesn’t happen overnight.
Maybe a few pointers would help. This Theory Thursday post is about conquering old targets and setting new ones.
Firstly, ask yourself one simple question and answer it out loud: why do you want to write?
It’s probably the most important question that you’ll ever be tasked with replying to, but more often than it being asked by strangers, it should come from yourself.
Do you write for yourself or others, or is there a greater imagined legacy to your work? If your novel is for fun, then putting yourself under pressure to deliver word targets or hit daily goals can be stifling. But if you’re looking to become a professional at writing, then keeping yourself on the right path is vital.
To that end, you want to set realistic goals when it comes to committing words to your project. There are many tricks to keeping yourself coming back to the blank page, such as starting in the middle of a sentence or drafting a brief ‘plotting’ paragraph to tell you what you’ll be writing the next day which you put together the night before. In the end, though, it comes down to you.
Brass tacks, its whether you can sit down and focus on putting one word in front of the other and keep going until, like a great army marching onwards, page after page from that single first step, you drive forward in your story and get over the line.
Then you redraft, and structural edit and edit again, then proof edit and then panic about that typo on page 67 where you spelled their as they’re even though you’re perfectly aweir - awhere - aware of the difference.
So how big should your target be? Setting yourself a lengthy target of 2,000 words per day could be counter-productive. Sure, it’s possible to write that amount every day for a week and when you’re in flow, you might even find it easy. but what about the following week? You might get tangled up in an awkward block of prose or struggle to pick your way through complicated dialogue that you need to keep both entertaining and informative. If you fall short of your word target, it can be demoralising and lower the value of any single sentence, which is counter-productive to the whole creative process.
Let’s say you wake up and want to write 1,000 words. It’s loose, vague and could easily fail.
Now suppose you make a plan the night before to write 500 words the next day. You’ll be writing the opening chapter of your upcoming novel, where your central character escapes a threat to their life and you define their living situation at a point of crisis. You have from the moment you wake up until 8pm that night to complete the task because you’ve told a friend that is exactly when you’ll email it to them.
You now have a specific, measurable target with an attainable amount of words, a relevant task to complete and a time to deliver it. Now all your need is to pick up your pen or sit at your laptop.
Be specific, task yourself with an achievable target and you might find committing those words to the page is a whole lot easier the next day, week, month and year.
There are some really good apps that help with this such as Scrivener.
Good luck!
Want to know how to write a cliffhanger? Would you’d like to know. OK, I know that you’d like to know. That was an example of a cliffhanger. More here in The Art of the Cliffhanger.