The first rule of writing goals is…
Oddly enough the first rule of setting writing goals is not “Don’t talk about your writing goals,” so here goes!
The first – and only – rule of setting writing goals is to write every day.
For a year.
365 days = 365,000 words.
This simple sounding idea is what attracted me. Even though I’m a professional writer, I don’t necessarily write every day. I tend to take weekends off. I don’t always work on the same thing every day, either, so I can easily get off track with my projects. So why not make the leap?
Since this is my first year taking up the challenge, I decided to join the club at the Poe Level. Instead of committing to writing 1,000 words every day (which is how you get to 365K in a year), I’ve agreed to write just 275 words per day, which works out to around 100K in a year’s time. That’s going to be a bunch of blog posts, guest posts, short fiction and books when I’m through!
As this is the end of the first week of the challenge, I though I’d take this opportunity to post my word counts for the week and show you how I did.
January 1, Day 1: 563 words
January 2, Day 2: 0 words (my husband received some extremely bad personal news, and I spent most of my day attempting to console him)
January 3, Day 3: 901 words
January 4, Day 4: 897 words
January 5, Day 5: 232 words (aside from Day 2, this is my worst word count so far… which I blame on the fact that I didn’t do my writing first thing in the morning, as I had planned)
January 6, Day 6: 372 words
January 7, Day 7: 348 words
January 8, Day 8: 658 words
That’s a grand total of 3,971 words for the week!
And here’s my WordKeeperAlpha graph:
If that’s not motivational, I don’t know what is.
I’ve set various goals for my writing this year, in both the fiction and nonfiction spheres, and I’ve been planning out my year accordingly. I can already see how these writing goals are going to help me really achieve lots more with my writing, and that’s only after the first week!
Want to play along?
You can jump in anytime! Just start recording your daily word counts somewhere – whether it’s in a Google Docs spreadsheet or on a word counting site like WordKeeperAlpha. Feel free to check in with your accomplishments here, too! I plan to post weekly updates, to help keep myself on track, along with monthly reports to chart my progress, and you’re free to jump in with comments on how you’re doing as well so we can cheer each other on.
