SMART goals

A couple posts ago, I said I wanted to discuss how I know what to focus on when I spend five to fifteen minutes writing. Figuring that out when you know the clock is ticking can be daunting, and for me, this was one of the more challenging aspects of writing in a short amount of time when I first started. I’d have a large chunk of my novel in my head—and feel guilty for not having the whole thing in mind all at once—and take several minutes to sink into what I was doing.

My problem was, I believed I had to go into the writing without a plan and that the plan would come to me as I wrote. And sometimes that happens. When it does—and when I can afford to sink into the work slowly—I can find ways of changing my manuscript in creative ways that I wouldn’t have thought of without a couple hours to mull over the big picture. But the real benefit of writing in small chunks of time is the opportunity to focus on a small chunk of your WIP.

Narrowing your focus can help you set a SMART goal for the session. Since I’m sure a lot of you have heard about SMART goals, I’ll go straight to how this can work for your writing session—not the entire work of writing a novel or screenplay or book of poems or even a short story, but just for your five, ten, or fifteen minutes. In fact, once I started thinking about how much I rely on SMART goals when I’m writing during a ten-minute break, I realized I needed to break each aspect down in its own post.

S, for SPECIFIC, requires you to consider not your entire WIP but just the part you want to work on. In fact, it might be even smaller than you think it will be. Here’s what I mean: Suppose you’re revising a novel and have one page to revise. You may not be able to consider dialogue, plot, theme, character, exposition, and every other element of writing in five minutes—and that’s not a bad thing. Use your five minutes to check the dialogue on that one page. You may find that two characters who need different voices sound a lot like each other. You may find a lack of dialogue tags that confuses the reader. You may find a lot of things that we say in real life but that don’t work well in writing—a page full of “Yeah” and “Sure” and “You know.” (My personal favorite is “Look,” which I really need to excise. It’s the frustrated “Look,” as in, “Look, I know how you feel about this, but I need you to quit being such a butthead right now.”)

When you’ve homed in specifically on this one aspect of this set amount of pages, it’s much easier to dive in and take care of business. Even if I have a couple hours to write, I try to pick one aspect instead of everything that occurs on one page. It’s exhausting to jump between dialogue and exposition and internal consistency and everything else before moving to the next page. It divides my attention into blocks, which means I have to expend time and energy changing between them. In addition to not helping my WIP, it cuts into my enthusiasm for the project and for writing in general. If I leave my desk feeling exhausted and unaccomplished because I’ve been wrestling with ten problems instead of one, I’m going to remember that the next time I write. And I’m going to dread it.

Make things easier on yourself. Pick one specific goal for your next writing session. It doesn’t have to be big; there is no B in SMART. Use that S for specific to help you reach your goals.