SMART goals, part 3

The third aspect of SMART goals, after specific and measurable, is often phrased as “agreed upon”—and that may not seem to fit here. After all, it’s writing, and if you don’t have an agent, editor, or readers to consider (yet!), you may not be sure how to implement this aspect of SMART goals. But unless you’re journaling, you do have future stakeholders: your readers. If you haven’t yet considered your target audience for your work, consider it now. It’s a step a lot of people like to skip for a couple reasons: First, they feel like they’re pigeonholing their own work and that their writing should be for everyone (after all, it has to be universal, right?), and second, they don’t want to be slavishly devoted to guessing whatever a bunch of strangers want their book to be.

But even books that seemingly all of us are reading (Harry Potter, anyone?) have a target audience that the books eventually grew past. Harry Potter, with its childlike humor and deeply realized world, appeals to kids of all ages—including those of us who aren’t (technically) kids anymore. And considering your target audience doesn’t mean crowdsourcing the ideas for your book; it means learning what conventions your readers expect and deciding how to incorporate or subvert them. If you familiarize yourself with the literary conversation you’re entering (that is, the way your chosen genre interacts with its particular audience), your writing will benefit greatly.

But of course, “agreed upon” ultimately happens when your readers plunk down money and buy your book, or when they pick up your writing and agree to keep reading. And you have limited control over their decision to do so. That’s why it’s also useful to consider the other meaning of the letter A: attainable.

Attainable goals are especially important to consider when you have very small amounts of time to write. As my husband would heartily attest, I’m an over-scheduler. I tend to cram my calendar as full of events and tasks as possible and then say, “Let’s double it.” This works out fine when I’m willing to put my activities in tiers: things that absolutely must get done today, things to do if I have time after the must-dos, and things I can put off until another day. But if I were to tell myself I can write a new chapter in ten minutes, I would clearly be fooling myself—unless my chapters were the written version of mini cupcakes. (Which might actually be a good thing. Who wants just one mini cupcake?)

So whenever my writing routine changes—new WIP, different amount of time, more distractions in my life or my surroundings—I try to notice approximately how long I’ve been writing and what I’ve accomplished during that time. That gives me a good baseline for determining what I should expect of myself. With my current WIP, I can revise about a page in ten minutes. So when I know I’m approaching a section that doesn’t pose any particular challenges, I expect to revise two pages if I have twenty minutes. If I’m working on a section that I know I haven’t fully figured out yet, I might write one or two sentences but iron out the problem I’d been mulling over. And that also counts as good progress.

Creating attainable goals will strengthen your writing process in the long term. You waste less time beating yourself up for not accomplishing more, which gives you more time for the writing itself. And that process of working a little bit at a time can end up helping you finish your WIP faster than you would have otherwise.