How To Create Achievable Writing Goals

In honor of the New Year, let’s talk writing goals. Specifically, creating realistic and achievable writing goals.

How much should you aim to write in one day? How often should you write? What happens when you fall behind? Below I’ve outlined the steps on not only how to create achievable 2021 writing goals, but how to build healthy writing habits for years to come!

CREATING ACHIEVABLE WRITING GOALS:

1. Figure out your writing lifestyle

2. Identify your target goal and timeframe

3. Test Run

4. Recalibrate (if necessary)

5. Set motivational milestones

6. Find an accountability partner

7. How to adjust when you fall behind

8. Keep in touch

1.     Figure out your writing lifestyle

• How many words can you comfortably write in a day? How long does it take you, and how much time do you regularly have to write?

  These are three questions you must find the answer to before you can plan out your 2021 writing goals. For those of you that are new to writing, you can estimate or I’d recommend taking some time—perhaps a week or two—to try it out in real time and see what works for you.

  For those that are old hats at this game, you probably have a pretty good idea of where your daily writing habits sit, but I’d encourage you to push yourself a bit and see if you can take your writing speed to the next level (not sacrificing quality, of course)

• Set your minimum achievable daily goal and your ideal goal

  I recommend writers have two daily goals – a minimum achievable daily goal and an ideal goal.

  The minimum achievable daily goal you set should be an easily attainable number that you are sure to hit every day that you sit down to write. And this serves two purposes: first, it is a confidence booster! Like putting something on your “to do” list that you can immediately check off, this attainable goal helps you to feel accomplished and motivated, and can help you keep in the habit of writing, even on hectic days. The second, and more important, purpose is it gets you writing. Of course you can write 250 words today, so you’ll sit down to do so. Well, since you are already there, might as well just write a few more. And before you know it, you may very well hit your ideal goal!

  Your ideal goal is just that – an ideal number of words you’d love to write in any given day. My one caution to this is to make sure that, while ideal, this goal is still realistic. While we’d all love to write 10,000 words in a day, it is probably not realistic for most of us. You want to make sure it is a goal you are confident in. That, if you pushed yourself, you could meet.

• Make your goals healthy and sustainable

  For most of you, the publishing dream is to make writing a career. So treat your writing the same way you would a job—plan for vacation days, sick days, mental health days…. There are going to be times when you need the day off for whatever reason, so make sure to build that into your writing lifestyle now.

  So looking at a month, perhaps you schedule yourself to write only 20 days out of the month – a regular, 5-day work schedule. Or, make it unique to your needs. Maybe you know you’ll always want a day in between big writing days to let your creative brain recharge. Whatever works best for how you write and live so that you can not only achieve your 2021 writing goals, but your writing goals moving forward.  

• Should you write every day?

  A lot of writers recommend that you write every day. It isn’t bad advice, but while getting into the habit of writing every day is wonderful, I’d add a caveat to it to say, you don’t have to write your main project—the current publishing goal you’re working towards—every day.

  You want to get to the point where, on days when you were planning to write—however many days a week that may be—it feels odd not to write. Like something is missing.

  But you also don’t want to push yourself too hard or burn out on a project. So consider writing three days a week on your current goal and free-write otherwise. Or maybe you have a side project you could work on as well. Something to give you a bit of balance, even as you continue to build your writing habit.  

2.     Identify your target goal and timeframe

• The next step in creating your achievable goals is setting your target word count goal and timeframe. This is going to be different for everyone depending on what genre you are writing, so a science fiction or fantasy novel might be anywhere from 90,000 words to 100,000 or more. A romance falls more in the 60,000-80,000 word category. There are a lot of resources for this online if you’d like to learn more, or check out how long your comparable titles are.

   Your book is going to be unique to you and doesn’t necessarily need to fit into this structure, but it is a good starting point to know what the market (and publishers) are generally expecting. Then you can adjust as you move forward and decide how long you want your story to be.

•  Once you have your target goal, then you need to narrow in on your timeframe. How long do you want to give yourself to write your story? Combine what you know about your writing lifestyle and your target goal to see what your target timeline could be.

   So, for an example, let’s say you want to write a 100,000 word novel in 6 months.

   Breaking it down, that is, on average, 16,700 words a month, or 560 words a day. Sounds very doable!

   But don’t forget to add in the “healthy and sustainable” part of your lifestyle. That 560 words is expecting you to write every day. Instead, let’s plan on a regular work writing week, so 20 days a week. That is 835 words per day. Now take that number and compare it with the writing lifestyle you figured out above – is that realistic? Achievable?

  I highly recommend basing this decision on your minimum achievable goal, not your ideal goal. That way, you can write more and get ahead of the game, but on a day when you only hit your minimum, you are meeting your goals instead of falling behind. So if your minimum achievable goal is 500 words, maybe you’ll want to extend your timeframe out to 7 or 8 months. Or if it is 1000 words, perhaps you can shorten it, or give yourself more time off!

  Keep in mind that there are other things you are going to want or need to do as a writer, such as research, comp reads, and more, so giving yourself time for those activities is wise as well.

  Once you’ve done all the math, solidify your plan and then….

3.     Test run

• Now is the time to see if your estimations will work against the test of real life. Take a week or two—or a month if you can—write according to the lifestyle and goals you’ve set for yourself, and see how it works.

4.     Recalibrate (if necessary)

• Then recalibrate if necessary. There is no good or bad here. If your current plan works, fabulous! But if not, that is okay too. Adjust, figure out what works best for you in the season you are in. 1000 words a day or 10 words a day, the goal is to get you writing, regularly working towards a goal.

  I’d also encourage you to make a date with yourself to check back in. What works now might not work six months from now when your kids are out of school for the summer. Or maybe you are starting a new job and can only write 200 words a day, but in a few months, you’ll be more settled and can adjust. 

5.     Motivational Milestones

• Once you have your schedule set, then comes the fun part – motivational milestones! Finishing your story is obviously the big goal, but you want to make sure to reward yourself along the way as well.

  Maybe you’ll get to go see a movie (post-COVID) when you finish your first full week of writing on schedule. Or you get to go to the bookstore! Some sort of reward that will push you to keep working, even on those hard days, and train your brain to see the rewards that come from sticking to your writing habit.  

  I also want to mention what I call Author Forgiveness—shamelessly stolen from accident forgiveness. You are going to have off days. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but it is going to happen even if you have the best writing plan and schedule.

  It is still okay to reward yourself even if you slip a bit. If your plan is to hit all your writing days for the month, but you miss a day or two? You should still get that reward! Author Forgiveness means pushing yourself, but allowing for life to be… life. Now, of course, if you miss writing for three days this week and your plan was to reward yourself at the end of the week, you might have to skip the reward and start anew next week.

  It is all about balance. Figure out what works best for you and push yourself, but allow for the crazy that is life.

  We’re working on the honor system for motivational milestones, but I trust you. You’ve got this.

6.     Find an accountability partner

• A big key in keeping up with your goals, in addition to the motivational milestones, is finding an accountability partner. Whether you tell your best friend, your writing partner, or just blast it out on social media, declare your goal—loud and proud!
  Knowing that someone is going to check in with you is going to help you want to keep moving forward. You want to be able to tell them how much progress you’ve made, how awesome you are.

7.     What to do when you fall behind

• When you fall behind, the best advice I can give is don’t put yesterday’s words on today’s goal. When you miss a day, or several days, your instinct is going to be to make today’s goal higher to make up for lost time.
  Don’t do it. Focus on today—your only goal for today is your original minimum achievable goal. That is it. Now, of course, the hope is that you’ll get in a writing groove and write more. And if you do, and make up some words you may have missed, that may call for a reward! BUT it is not a requirement. The overarching dream of all of this is to get you in the habit of writing. You want it to feel weird if you don’t write every day. But the moment you start putting extra pressure on yourself to write an extra 500, 1000, however many words, the story might start to feel stilted or you might have a hard time sitting down to write at all. That tiny voice in your brain saying, “Well, if you couldn’t write the 500 words yesterday, what makes you think you can write 1000 today?”
  You send that voice right back where it came from. A) You can do whatever you put your mind to, but the bigger point is B) you aren’t writing a 1000 words today. You know you can write 500 words. You are going to write 500 words, and then if you happen to write more? Hell yes.

  Now, there may be times when you really fall behind. What if you haven’t written in weeks? In months? If something happened in life, then that is how it goes. Just keep focusing on that minimum achievable goal and know that tomorrow is a new day.

  But maybe you just can’t get yourself to do it. Your plan isn’t working. There is nothing wrong with that. Jump back a few steps, recalibrate, and figure out what you need for this new season in your life. Adjustment is not failure, and other author’s writing progress/writing goals are not yours.

  Eyes on your own paper, people!

8.     Stay in touch!

• Many of you probably already have editors, beta readers, or someone in your life that is waiting on the edge of their seat for your novel. Along the lines of an accountability partner, these people can be helpful in your journey, but more than just checking in, they can be a sounding board for when you run into troubled waters.
  They can help you adjust if your schedule isn’t going according to plan, or talk with you to see what is going on and how they might be able to get you back on track.

Writing is a flexible and complicated process, but by following these steps, you will be prepared to take on any bump in the road and meet your goals in no time!

So excited to see what you guys start writing in 2021!

Want to see my video on Setting Achievable Goals? Check out the below!