New Year's writing resolutions

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, however you define it: time with family or friends or by yourself, eggnog or hot chocolate, long walks around neighborhoods filled with decorations and lights—or hey, why not all of the above? My schedule was packed this past month, which I’m grateful for, but now that 2017 is here, I’m glad to refocus on my writing.

My main writing goal for this year is to revise my WIP and begin sending it to agents. Maybe you have a similar goal in mind for your own writing; maybe yours is different. Either way, here are some things I try to keep in mind when I set a long-term writing goal for myself, at New Year’s or any other time:

• Choose something under my control. “Get my book published” is under my control only if I’m self-publishing it; I can’t make an agent or editor accept my novel. A more realistic approach is to do everything I can to make my book attractive to publishers: revise it well, research agents who represent similar works, and query them.

• Craft mini-goals to keep myself on track. I don’t want to look back at this year on December 31 and say, “Well, I wanted to send out my novel, but I got lost in the details.” Instead, I’ve spaced out the steps I’ll need to accomplish in order to reach my goal. I’d like to finish my second draft in May, send the manuscript to my beta readers in June, and incorporate their feedback by September. As I’m waiting for their responses, I want to research agents who are likely to accept my novel and craft query letters for each of them. Once I’ve put the (temporarily) finishing touches on the manuscript—because extra work even after an acceptance is a given—I’ll send it out in September or October.

• Be flexible. If I don’t reach, say, my mini-goal of finishing draft 2 by May, that doesn’t mean I’m permanently derailed. Instead, I can look at why I didn’t accomplish that step in the time frame I gave myself. Maybe I caught pneumonia and couldn’t do anything for a month (fingers crossed, that won’t happen!). Or maybe my draft needed a lot more work than I’d thought. Or maybe I just didn’t work on my novel as much as I should have in the beginning of the year. Whatever it is, I can use my assessment, along with the extra few months at the end of the year, to fine-tune my goal and make a workable plan to achieve it.

Maybe your writing goal is less about traditional publication and more about the craft of writing, finding time to write, or self-publishing your book. If so, ask yourself what you need in order to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you’d like to be at this time next year. If you want to learn more about the craft of writing, you may benefit from books on craft, from a writers’ group, or, if you have the time and money, from earning an MFA. If you want to self-publish your book, you’ll need to learn about the publishing industry, including the marketing your book will require.

And of course, if you want to find time to write, keep checking this blog on Fridays for more ways to make your ten-minute time gaps work for you.