Wednesday, March 21, 2012

03/21/2012 Writing Wednesday!

Welcome back everyone! I hope this week is treating you better sickness is treating my boyfriend. Things with work are starting to calm down, which is good, and I'm trying to be a bit nicer to my wrist after over-doing it a bit last week.

Today I wanted to bring up goal setting. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but it's not like it stops being important. Goal setting is something we learn at rather early ages, and (at least my) teachers explain to us how to come up with both long-term and short-term goals so that we start learning what it means to be rewarded and to feel a sense of accomplishment. Writing has the same idea behind it in that you need to come up with both long-term and short-term goals in order to actually get anything completed.

Now I will be using my own methods as examples for this post, mostly because it's easier for me and will hopefully give a little insight into how I put things together. Now, having a generic goal, long or short term will never get you anywhere in the end. Saying something like "I'm going to write more!" is like making a New Years Resolution to just "lose weight"; without specifics you are going nowhere. What you want to do is say something along the lines of 'I'm going to write at least 3 days out of the work week, and try to get more done at work so that I can meet a deadline of X date.' A goal like that has some kind of structure you can hold onto and work into a routine, which means you have a high chance of actually accomplishing it.

That was an example of a short-term goal, since it obviously doesn't cover a span of some incredibly long amount of time. I didn't put any word quotas or specific times/days in there because there are always going to be factors that might throw that out the window, and the last thing you want to do is feel awful if you didn't write 1200 words in a day because you got sick, or there was some other part of life that demanded more attention.

The time of long-term goal that I am personally using is basically something along the lines of 'I'm going to get my book series completed'. It doesn't have a time frame, or limit, it's just simply that it's going to be done. Honestly the series will be finished when the books are (obviously) and I don't want to say I'm going to finish 5 or 6 books before the end of the next year or two because I'm not a crazy person. (Though you never know!) The important thing is that there is a goal in place ad that I am using my short-term goals to work towards achieving it.

When it comes to accomplishing any goal, short or long-term, remember there are going to be bumps in the road and there will be days when you don't know if you can actually make it. These are moments we all have to face, but remember we're all in this together and what's important is that you keep pressing on. Once you finish it you will be incredibly happy and satisfied that you did.

Thanks everyone for stopping by again this week! I'll come back on Friday with some another review for you all to check out. I hope this blog is helping out my fellow writers, since that is the purpose of it. If you ever have any questions, definitely contact me or leave a comment! I'll see everyone Friday!

No comments:

Post a Comment