Writing Goals for 2024
Linden Gross
Grow Your Business by Writing a Book | NYT bestselling ghostwriter | Book Coach | Author | Speaker
Are the writing goals you’ve set for yourself helping or hindering your writing?
Susan Uttendorfsky, Adirondack Editing’s book editor, managing editor, and owner posted a helpful observation on LinkedIn. She wrote:
“Some writers only think about the last step—publishing their book or article. And sometimes that never happens! What can you do to prevent failure to complete your main objective?”
Her answer was to set interim, reachable writing goals that help set you up for success. She suggests making sure that your goals are SMART:
As she points out, “finish my book is not specific, measurable, or time-bound, although it may, for you, be achievable and realistic.”
Besides, finish my book is the end goal, not the interim goal. You need to find a way to reward yourself along the way by setting the kinds of smaller goals that you can actually meet or surpass on a regular basis. That’s called self-motivation.
Conversely, creating daily time expectations or word-count expectations for yourself that are unrealistic and that you’re highly unlikely to achieve just sets you up for disappointment and self-castigation. And that’s a surefire recipe for never reaching that end goal at all.
So, this year treat yourself like you would someone you love. Set yourself up to win by creating a series of specific interim writing goals you know you can achieve. Then when you go above and beyond, give yourself a high-five and let your steady accomplishments fuel the rest of the ride.
Here’s to an awesome 2024.