For those who read the rest of my blog, and not just the posts about writing, you know that I have a anally obsessively compulsive rigorous process for setting goals and tracking them — think of it as like setting New Year’s resolutions but on steroids. But there are some areas where “goals” are great, yet they only work if you can break them down in to digestible — and achievable — smaller chunks.
So let’s assume you have a big goal of being an author. Under traditional publishing, the ultimate end was outside your control — in theory, you could hammer away at agents and editors with proposal after proposal and never “succeed”. Your digestible “bits” were process stuff, not a measure of your ultimate outcome. With e-publishing, and self-publishing more specifically, coming of age in recent years (if not months), you can change your goal into something that is actually achievable i.e. even if no one “accepts” your MS for traditional publishing, you can bypass them and publish yourself.
Yet, you might still want to have larger writing goals. Konrath’s website, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, included a sample of his writer’s resolutions from 2006 to 2012, and I wanted to highlight a bunch that I think are worthy of emulation because they are not all about process…note, with apologies to the master, that the headings are mine, as are the groupings:
- Process
- I will start/finish the damn book
- I will finish every story I start
- I’ll quit procrastinating in the form of research, outlines, synopses, taking classes, reading how-to books, talking about writing, and actually write something
- Improvement
- I will listen to criticism
- I will always remember where I came from
- If you’re a writer, you must be a reader.