SMART goals, part 2

Last week I began a discussion of applying SMART goals to your short writing sessions. (If you haven’t read the first post, on S for specific, you may want to check it out now.) M, for measurable, is next. It may seem like a very objective and obvious aspect of SMART goals, perhaps more so than specificity—after all, measurable implies numbers. However, there are several approaches you can take when setting a measurable goal for your writing session:

• Measure by time: If you’re tackling the same process-based project I am, you’re probably already doing this by giving yourself a set amount of time in which to write and then working during that entire time. Even so, this can be a little tricky. Nobody likes the feeling of sitting down to write only to realize your time is up when you’ve written a single sentence (especially when you’ve deleted that one sentence after writing it!). Neither do we like the uncertainty that comes from powering through the pages while harboring that nagging feeling that we’re working too quickly and not paying attention to what the writing requires. So I like measuring my goal in some way other than time; that way, my aim isn’t reduced to “spend X amount actually typing” or “make sure to stop and think for Y amount of time.”

• Measure by pages or word count: This one makes it easier to measure your productivity, but for me, counting my pages or words works better when I’m writing a first draft. With a first draft, I can write quickly, without thinking too much about word choice and other details. If I know the basic outline of what’s going to happen in a chapter, I can give myself an hour to write five pages and know I can make it happen. With later drafts, I don’t always know what a reasonable page count is when I go into a writing session. I might be at a point in my WIP that’s sparkling with awesomeness, and all I have to do for the next five pages is change Sally’s name to Marge. Or those five pages might need a lot of work—and a lot of thought about the nature of the work to be done. By the page/word count method of goal-setting, the sparkling-with-awesomeness pages make it seem like you’ve accomplished a lot more than you have if all you’ve done for an hour is thought about how your secondary character would respond to a surprise visit from his grandmother from Nebraska and the resulting changes to your plot if you can’t convince yourself he would just drop everything to go on a road trip to Argentina with her. (But it does sound like fun.) In reality, you’ve done much more valuable work in your writing by asking yourself these big-picture questions that don’t fit nicely into a quick revision session.

• Measure by events (or aspects of events) in the story: This is, of course, my favorite, especially during shorter writing sessions. Five pages might not be an appropriate unit for measuring progress, but describing my character’s apartment, giving her best friend a cat, or reading aloud the dialogue from a single scene can all provide clear benchmarks for the progress in your writing session. One of the great things about measuring my progress in this way is the flexibility this offers. A page is a page, but if I have only five minutes, instead of committing to write half a page and perhaps feeling bad and telling myself I accomplished less than I’d wanted, I can commit to revising my character’s description of the changing landscape on her way to the mountains. That description is its own unit. That description doesn’t equal one-fifth of a car chase or one-tenth of an explosion; it’s its own thing. And in this way, I can better focus on the quality of the work I’ve done instead of getting overwhelmed by whatever I didn’t finish or tempted to rush ahead and turn out a sloppy draft.

Measuring my progress this way feels organic, not forced. It keeps me focused on the work I’m doing, not on how fast I’m doing it. And even better, it grounds me in the world of my WIP so that when I return to it, I feel like I never left.