Goals and Writing

My word count stands at 98,896 on the first draft.

I had been hoping to finish my first draft in November, spend December editing and rewriting, and then celebrate the New Year by starting my agent/publisher search and collecting my rejection notices.

Well, I still have a few more bits to go on the first draft. I'm thinking I'm very close to my final scenes as I have them laid out in my head, but I obviously didn't quite make my "Done In November" goal.

This brings me to goals in writing. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't make it, obviously, but I can't let it keep me down. I have, however, been keeping to my previous goal of 500+ words per day. Almost every day I have added over 1,000 words to the first draft. For me, with my schedule, that's very good. There have been only a few days where I have skipped adding to my manuscript, and if you average out my progress I have still managed to keep ahead of my goal by a decent margin.

Writing a book, or attempting to write a book in my case, takes discipline. Wanna-be writers have a huge bag of excuses at their disposal to derail writing that Great American Novel. I have plenty of them; I lack time, I lack talent, and the odds are greatly stacked against new authors trying to break into the market, the effort isn't worth it for the amount of money the vast majority of authors make from months (or years) of toil...

...and it's all true, for the most part. Or at least in some way valid.


So I started setting goals and evaluating how to meet those goals, and admitted that it takes a certain amount of discipline to meet those goals. I cut time out of the TV time to be replaced with "placing my butt in the seat and the hands on the keyboard". I don't have a home office space so I will take a laptop into the bedroom with a lapdesk so I have a slightly quieter space to try focusing a little better on my story.

My most basic goal is to make some advancement on the story each day, be it a 100 words or 1,000 words. I have good days and bad days, but I've had very very few days where I don't add something to the first draft.

I use these goals to keep me motivated through the doubts and fears. I don't have an English degree, I didn't even really like my English classes in school. I don't know if anyone would like my story; they very well might not. I fully acknowledge that this is a first attempt at writing anything more complicated than a long email and as such it will very likely not be anything near what the masters on the shelves at Barnes and Noble have written.

On the other hand, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck have had books released as well.

So I plug on, focusing on my goals more than my fears. If I never get published, I'll have pride in knowing that I tried, and that I gave it an honest effort in addition to the pride of having made my goals and stuck with them.

If you want to achieve something in life you need to create goals to help measure your progress. If you don't make a milestone, you reassess and move on, continuing to make progress. Only fail yourself by giving up on your goals...so...I've failed to finish the first draft in November. I'm now going to try focusing on finishing it up as soon as I can into December so I can start editing and rewriting, and still at least try to start the query process in January. It's not too late to meet that goal yet...