how to get one step closer to publication through setting smart goals
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Realistic Goal-Setting for Writers
We all know that setting goals helps us get what we want out of life. Wandering aimlessly, particularly in the publishing industry, isn’t likely to get you very far, particularly if you’re aiming to build a writing business.
Setting and achieving realistic writing goals has an added benefit of motivating you to continue working toward loftier writing goals. But how do we go about setting goals for our writing that actually help us to reach the success we desire?
Recognizing Realistic Writing Goals
It might seem like goal-setting is as simple as stating what we want to achieve. But there’s a right way to approach goals from a writing perspective.
Writers often make the mistake of setting goals like “get published by a traditional publisher” or “hit the New York Times best-seller list.” While those might be fun things to reach for, they aren’t truly “goals” because you have no control over their achievement. Think about that and really let it sink in.
You cannot control whether you are published by a traditional publisher. Period, end of story. You can work toward it and do all the right things, and it’s still up to the publisher to decide whether they want to take a chance on your book. They make decisions based on their own goals, not yours.
And, even if you did sell to a publisher, hitting the best-seller list is a numbers game. It’s up to readers, and the timing of their purchases, as to whether you hit the list. So, once again, this “goal” is out of your control, making it unrealistic.
What do you imagine happens over time if you don’t achieve your goals? You’ll likely feel discouraged, frustrated, angry…maybe you’ll even give up something you love doing simply because you set the wrong goals.
Setting Realistic Writing Goals
So, what’s a realistic goal? A realistic writing goal is one that is within your power to achieve. A goal that you can control the outcome of, independent of outside forces.
Setting goals that fit certain realistic criteria can actually help you achieve them! And with each achieved goal, you build your confidence, your feeling of being successful, and this fuels you to keep going! Self-inflicted motivation for the win!
So how can you set writing goals that build your confidence instead of tearing it down? How do you set smart goals (or SMART goals)? By testing your goals against a set of criteria to determine if they are the right goals to put on your list.
The basics of SMART goals are pretty commonly known. A SMART goal must be:
Specific - Be specific about what you want to achieve.
Measurable - Make sure you can measure whether this goal has been achieved.
Achievable/Attainable - Be realistic about what you can achieve or what’s actually attainable by you.
Relevant - Make sure this goal is relevant to the objectives you have for your life and writing.
Time-bound - Set a time limit or deadline.
What makes these criteria magical is the fact that you control every aspect. With you in control of the goals, when you achieve them you can take all the credit. And if you don’t achieve them, you can take a closer look and pivot as needed.
Deep Dive into SMART Writing Goals
So, let’s take a closer look at SMART goals and how the criteria work to the benefit of writers. Remember that each goal you set needs to fit all five of the points.
For example, if the goal is specific but not measurable, it fails to meet the criteria, and you need to take a closer look. Most goals that don’t meet all criteria just need to be reworked, so don’t lose heart if the first few goals you set fail to meet the mark. Keep digging and refining until you have a goal (or goals) that fit all the criteria.
Specific
Setting a specific goal is important. For example, “Write a book” isn’t specific. But “Start and complete my YA novel about a protagonist who has to adapt to life in Germany when her parents relocate her unexpectedly” is very specific. You know what you are going to work on very specifically.
Specifics work because having something particular to work toward allows your brain to take it and run. Your brain is pretty brilliant, and once you tell it what the specific goal is, it can get to work looking for everything needed to meet this specific goal. If you’re vague and nonspecific, it encourages “shiny object” syndrome. Your brain knows you need to write a book, but it doesn’t know which book, so every new shiny idea is going to cause it to derail and veer off path.
Measurable
Your goal should be measurable. The Measurable criteria dovetails off the Specific in that one kind of begets other. “I want to write more” isn’t measurable. It wouldn’t be possible to check off a list every day that said “I wrote more.”
Using the example above, though, you could say, “Write an 80,000-word novel,” which meets the “measurable” criteria, but it’s not specific. “Write an 80,000-word YA novel about a protagonist who has to adapt to life in Germany when her parents relocate her unexpectedly,” meets both specificity and measurability.
Why is measuring important? Because it allows you to break your goal down into actionable steps and identify when you’re done. If you’ve committed to a book with a word count of 80K, but you’ve only got 40K written, you know you’re not done (unless, of course, you decide to change the goal, which is totally okay!).
Achievable/Attainable
This is where some honesty comes in. When you set a goal like the one above, you have to be really honest and ask yourself if you can write that 80,000-word YA novel (within the timeframe we’ll talk about below). Is it achievable or attainable for you? This might be a different answer for you than for your writing buddy, and there is no shame if the answer is no.
The point of this particular criteria is to set yourself up for success, not failure. So what if you can’t write an 80,000-word novel this year? Write 40,000 words, 20,000, or even 10,000! The point is to make sure that your goal is achievable by you. (I’m going to hammer home “by you,” because, way too often, we decide we should do something just because someone else is doing it, and that’s a recipe for disaster.)
Note that it’s totally okay to set some “push goals” (goals that stretch you a little outside your comfort zone), but don’t set goals so lofty that there’s no way you can achieve them.
For example, as noted earlier, the goal of “get a book published by a traditional publisher this year” isn’t achievable or attainable by you. It’s up to the publishers. Other goals that get kicked to the curb by this particular point are goals like “sell a million copies of my book” or “get an agent.” None of these things are in your control.
Relevant
Does this goal get you where you want to go? Does it meet the life and career objectives you’ve set for yourself? For example, if you want a career as a fiction author, setting a goal to publish daily blog posts isn’t relevant to achieving that goal if it’s preventing you from having the time to actually write novels. Make sure that the goal is relevant to your long-term aspirations.
What if you’re not sure if this goal is relevant? Well, then, you need to spend some time really digging into what you want out of your writing. Do you want a career? Do you want to just be able to say you’re published? Do you want to, eventually, hopefully, replace your full-time income?
There’s a vast difference between just wanting to publish one book to say you did and wanting to make a full-time, income-replacing career out of writing. Either one is relevant, but be honest with yourself about what you want, what you’re willing to give up to get there, and what is realistic for your life.
In terms of relevance, too, take an honest look at your dreams and aspirations. If your dream is to “be published,” define what that means to you. If you think about it, you could write a “book” in an afternoon (probably not a very good one) and publish it on Amazon by the end of the night, making you an indie published author. But is that what you mean when you think of your dream of being published?
Be sure that you choose goals that are relevant to the actual, fully fleshed-out dreams and aspirations you have. Being vague won’t cut it.
Bonus tip: I mentioned another R word up there…Realistic. If Achievable or Attainable doesn’t get you thinking above, then Realistic might. Is everything about your goal realistic for you? If you’re a single mom with kids and a full-time job, then a goal to write an 80,000-word book every three months may not be realistic for you. And setting unrealistic goals isn’t going to get you anything but heartache and a lack of self-confidence.
Time-bound
This is the final criteria and another point that often trips authors up. Time-bound means that there is a time limit or deadline on your goal.
The reason for this is that it helps you focus. If your plan is to write an 80,000-word book, but you don’t set a time limit, you could, conceivably, take twenty years to write it! But that probably wasn’t what you had in mind.
Setting a deadline also allows you to break your goal into smaller steps. National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is a good example of SMART goal-setting, that fits all the criteria, including being time-bound.
The NaNoWriMo goal is Specific (once you decide what you’re writing), as well as Measurable (50,000 words). For some people, it is Achievable or Attainable, and it’s most assuredly Relevant for any participants, as they all have the goal of writing a book in a month. And, by virtue of being confined to the month of November, it’s Time-bound.
Being Time-bound helps you focus by allowing you to break that goal down into 1667 words per day, which, for a lot of people makes the whole, lofty goal of writing a “book in a month” seem much more do-able.
Revisiting Goals
Setting SMART goals can ensure that we’re setting ourselves up for success. I would guess (based on a lifetime of experience, let’s be honest) that the reason most of us fail to keep our New Year’s resolutions is that we don’t put as much thought into them as we should to ensure they fit into the SMART criteria. We make arbitrary goals, like “writing 20,000 words a week this year,” based on big dreams, but without examining that goal within the framework of our lives.
So, when the 31st of January rolls around and we’ve only written 20,000 words total, we just give up. We consider ourselves failures rather than just adjusting or adapting the goal to what we can achieve.
Goals don’t have to be rigid. There are no “goal police” waiting to bust you for changing your goals. Instead, think of goals as being fluid. What fits the above criteria today may become unachievable if a family member becomes ill or if my day job starts requiring mandatory overtime. Or maybe I simply find that the time limit I set for myself was too lofty.
Set yourself up for success by reviewing your goals often, making sure they still fit into the SMART framework based on what’s working and any change in circumstances. And if they aren’t working, be flexible. If you’re “failing” at writing 20,000 words per week, but you’ve been getting close to 5,000, make 5,000 or 6,000 per week your goal. (On the other hand, if you’re easily achieving more than 20,000 words per week, maybe you need to adjust your goal higher!)
By revisiting and reexamining your goals on a regular basis, you’ll know whether you’re on track or whether you need to make some adjustments, and you’ll avoid aimless wandering as you try to achieve the unachievable.
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