With 2023 at its end, it’s time to set your writing goals for the New Year.
In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns outlines the mistakes writers often make when setting their project goals and timelines, describes why small achievable goals are essential, and breaks down half a dozen key performance indicators writers should be tracking in order to monitor their progress.
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The Writing Coach Episode #184 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #184 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach, Kevin T. Johns here.
I hope that you had a fantastic holiday season. I’m recording this on New Year’s Eve-Eve. This holiday season has almost come to an end; we’re almost into 2024, which means it’s time to think about the goals that you want to set for yourself for 2024.
What is it you want to achieve this year with your writing?
Now, before we get into goal setting for writers, that’s going to be our topic today, I first want to do a public service announcement. Please save your manuscript in multiple places. I have a client whose computer recently blew up. Now they’re trying to piece it back together and recover all this data that she only had saved on her computer; you do not want to lose months, weeks or years of work on books or multiple books because of a computer blowing up. So save your work frequently while you’re working on it, save it on an external drive or thumb key of some kind, save it on your computer, email it to yourself, save it in the cloud, print off copies, and I’m talking about doing all of those things.
If the house burns down and you lose the hard copies in your computer, you have it in the cloud. If Google or OneDrive or Dropbox goes out of business and you lose everything in the cloud, well, at least you haven’t saved on your computer. If your computer dies, at least you haven’t saved in your email. If computers die, if there’s a nuclear war, and we’re back to pre-industrial age, at least you have some paper copies saved somewhere of that manuscript; make sure you have multiple, multiple copies saved.
There you have it. No marketing at the beginning of this week’s episode, just a public service announcement from me to you save, save, save your work. It is so heartbreaking to lose those words that you’ve put down on the page.
As you might notice, my voice might not be 100% in this episode. I have been sick for a week straight. I’ve taken three different COVID tests; I keep convincing myself that I’ve COVID because I’m so sick, but it keeps coming back negative, which means it’s just a cold and it’s the cold that just does not want to let go. I am hoping that perhaps, come the new year, I’ll finally be over this thing. I’m feeling maybe a little better today than I was yesterday, so hopefully this cold will finally go away. I’ve had it all through Christmas.
I’m not just mentioning my cold to whine and moan to you. I am mentioning it because anytime I talk about planning with writers, I talk about building slack into your timeline. By slack, I mean space for the unexpected. So many times when I see people setting goals and creating timelines for their creative projects, they do it in this imaginary world where everything works out perfectly.
Here’s the reality: life is not perfect. Nothing ever works out as planned.
On any project that you’re going to be working on for several months, you’re probably going to get sick somewhere in there, like I’m sick right now. Or you might have a busy week at work, or your kid might need you to attend a sports event or a recital, or you know, there are so many things obviously that can happen in life that can stand in the way of us sticking to our schedule and achieving goals that have been set in this artificial space of everything going perfect according to plan.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean by that. This is a weekly podcast, so it’s easy to set goals for it. You would think I would say there are 52 weeks in the year. This is a weekly podcast, so my goal for this podcast in 2024 is to record 52 episodes.
But as I said, that’s assuming life is perfect. That’s assuming, for 52 weeks straight, my schedule is going to be as anticipated. I’m going to be feeling great and I’m going to be able to record an episode. That is not a realistic goal as realistic as it sounds. It’s almost completely unattainable, or attaining it isn’t worth the effort it would take. It’s not that big a deal to me to miss a week in there.
Bringing it back to reading with the writers, they’ll say something like, “I want to write 52 chapters this year.” You’re never going to write a chapter a week; things are going to happen.
And so what’s my goal for this podcast?
40 episodes.
You might think, “Wow, that’s what, like twelve missed episodes?”
Yeah, that’s budgeting for at least once a month, something being off, something being weird. Now, hopefully, that doesn’t happen. Hopefully, I totally crush that goal and I’m way above 40 episodes. But 40 is realistic, and it’s attainable and achievable. Unlike so many goals, I see writers set that are ‘perfect world, everything works out’ goals, where they’re unattainable. And so they don’t get any of the joy of meeting deadlines, because the deadlines weren’t realistic in the first place.
In my FIRST DRAFT group coaching program, I work with a lot or a fair number of first time authors. And at the beginning of that program, we do a lot of this goal setting work, like we’re talking about in this episode of the podcast. But the thing is, if you’ve never written a book before, when you create deadlines and timelines for yourself, you are absolutely guessing at how long things are going to take. It’s a hypothesis, it’s an estimate, You don’t have any actual facts or data that you can base that goal on, You’re looking at what I recommend, what other writers seem to do, what you suspect you can pull off, and then you create a deadline and a timeline and milestones based around that.
But just like my example of 52 podcasts in 52 weeks, so many authors underestimate how long it really takes to write a book. And not just because they assume everything’s going to work out perfect, but also because it’s harder than they think. It just takes a lot more work than someone who hasn’t written a book might think. Even if authors are able to perhaps estimate the amount of time it takes them to get a first draft written, they almost always underestimate how long revisions take.
What I tell people is to schedule in at least at least twice as much time for revisions as you spent on the first draft. If you spent six months writing that first draft, I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to spend a year revising it and getting it publication ready.
There’s a lot of people out there, especially first time authors, who take years and years, six, seven years sometimes to get that first draft completed. It takes a long time for a lot of people and so you might be listening to this right now and saying, “Oh, Kevin, I’ve been working on my first draft for three years. Now you’re telling me I’m supposed to spend six years revising the manuscript?” No, that’s obviously ridiculous, but what that speaks to is the fact that spending three years, four years, five years on a first draft of a manuscript isn’t an efficient way to go about writing a book and you are totally underestimated the amount of time that needs to go into revising the book by trying to perfect a first draft. You’ve got to loosen up, you’ve got to drop some TKO (some ‘to comes’) in there, you’ve got to be willing to make mistakes and move forward in that first draft, so that you can buy yourself the amount of time that’s really required to take a rough manuscript and polish it up to be a high-quality book.
Another thing I want you to think about, especially if you’re a first-time author, but even if you’re not even if this is your fourth book, you need to remain flexible with your deadlines and timelines. You need to be willing to adjust those timelines and milestones and deadlines as you go.
I’m not saying this so that you have an excuse to miss deadlines. That’s not what this is about. But what it is about is recognizing the need to make realistic deadlines.
Deadlines and milestones don’t help if you’re not meeting them. It just puts extra pressure and stress on you and makes you feel like a failure.
One of the reasons we want to create lots of milestones in the writing process, one of the reasons we want to break things down into really small chunks, is so that we can celebrate small victories along the way. And those celebrations and the endorphins that come along with them build momentum; it feels good to hit deadlines, it feels good to be on track, and it feels good to be making progress.
When we’re feeling good, we’re more likely to meet our writing sessions; we’re more likely to get into that flow state, and we’re more likely to have fun writing our books. I
f you’re continually creating unrealistic deadlines that you don’t meet, it’s the complete opposite. You’re not getting those celebrations, you’re not getting those good feelings, you’re not building up that momentum, and all you’re doing is making yourself feel like a failure when the reality is the goal wasn’t achievable in the first place.
So how do we find that balance between being nimble and being flexible with our writing deadlines but also not using that flexibility as an excuse to continually miss deadlines?
Well, we make those adjustments, we make those changes to our milestones and our deadlines based on key performance indicators.
We are making an estimate at the beginning of the goal-setting process; we’re saying, I think, based on the information that I have, this is what the timeline for this project will look like. But once you are starting to work on that project, once you are at it for a few weeks, and then a few months, you should be tracking performance indicators. And then measuring those indicators against the goals that you’ve set for yourself.
If you have set a goal that requires you to write 8000 words a month, and you are currently writing 5000 words a month, there’s a huge discrepancy there between the timeline you’ve set for yourself the expectation you’ve set for yourself, and what you’ve realistically been able to produce.
If you’ve been writing for four months, and you produce 5000 words a month, look at your deadline and readjust it based on the 5000 words a month output instead of the 8000 words a month that you set for yourself.
Word Count is one of the best performance indicators that you can use during the drafting phase in particular. How many words did you get down this session? How many words did you get down this week? How many words are you shooting for in this book? Probably 80,000 words or something in that range. But using word count for a key performance indicator really only works if you’re in the first draft and if you’re typing those words into a computer.
A lot of writers that I work with prefer to first draft by freehand. It’s really tough to finish a writing session and count up to 1000 handwritten words. In that case, you might be looking at counting perhaps pages instead of word count when you’re writing by hand. I work with some screenplay authors as well, and screenwriters often count by page count, as opposed to word count.
You might also want to look at key performance indicators like number of acts written. Break that book up into three or four acts, give yourself a couple months for each act. Is one act taking longer than another? Or are you consistently moving from one act to another. This is another indicator that you can use to judge whether your timeline is realistic or not.
Once you’re into the revisions phase, this is really when word count can kind of start to go out the window, unless you’re doing a draft of the book where you’re specifically focused on reducing word count, in which case perhaps you’re tracking number of words deleted. That said, once we’re into the revisions phase, you’re probably looking at something more like the number of scenes revised, i.e. “I want to get five scenes revised this week,” that sort of thing.
You might also want to look at Acts revised. “I’m going to spend this month revising Act One I’m going to get it as good as it can be. And then I’ll spend the next month working on Act Two.” Again, this is an indicator that you can use to judge progress against your timeline.
Something that’s even more simple is the Seinfeld method. I’ve heard that this is, in fact, apocryphal, but it is said that at one point in his career, Seinfeld said that what he did was he sat down and wrote one joke a day. Once he wrote that joke, he crossed it off the calendar. By the end of the year, he had at least 365 jokes. Whether that’s apocryphal or not, what I do love about that is this idea of crossing it off the calendar.
I’m a really big proponent of visual representations of success. So even if you don’t want to get into the data, the numbers of counting words or pages or any of that, simply saying you’re going have five scheduled writing sessions each week, and then, when you complete that session, going into the calendar and marking it off with a sticker, with a checkmark, or some other visual representation of success, can be so motivating and helpful in keeping that momentum going, and also keeping those writing streaks going.
In my FIRST DRAFT group coaching program, we have a shared word count sheet that serves a couple of purposes: it gives the writers in the program that visual representation of success, adit also allows them to track whatever key metrics that they’re using, particularly word count for those writers in that first draft. Having a place where you can go at the end of a writing session and say, “I wrote this many words,” or “I revised this many scenes,” or “This is the 100th scheduled writing session in a row that I met and did not miss,”— all of those things are so helpful and so motivating, and so much more important than saying, “Oh, I’d like to have a book done by the end of 2024.”
Yes, we all want to publish a book next year. But what’s really going to make the difference is not those big goals that you set for yourself this week; it’s not those resolutions that you make on New Year’s Eve about all the success you’re going to have in 2024.
What really matters are those day-to-day steps that you’re going to take, one scene at a time, one draft of the book at a time, one writing session at a time.
And yes, we want those big goals. We want milestones along the way so that we have things to celebrate. But it’s the nitty gritty hard work of showing up and putting the words on the page day after day after day, week after week after week, that is going to lead to those big goals, those successes that you dream about a New Year’s Eve.
The world is never perfect. We always underestimate the amount of time it’s going to take to get projects done. Set goals and be ambitious, but also be nimble. Track progress and adjust milestones and goals based on reasonable key performance indicators that you can track over the process of the drafting of your book. That’s my final piece of advice for you in the year 2023.
Wow, it is over. This was a bit of a crazy year for me. I had some health challenges at the beginning of the year and spent a couple of months recovering. The idea that it’s now I’m coming up on a year since that happened is wild. The older I get, the quicker time flies by, and health challenges make you realize how short and precious life is. We don’t have an infinite amount of time to get our books written. We don’t have an infinite amount of time to achieve the things that we want to achieve in our lives. And so I encourage you to be ambitious this year.
But don’t be ambitious by setting wildly unrealistic goals. Be ambitious in meeting the work that needs to be done on a day-to-day basis. Show up, make that creative effort, whether you feel like it or not, whether you’re inspired today, whether or not you’re having a good day or bad day, show up, do the creative work that matters to you, get those words down on the page.
Time goes by so quickly, and even when it feels like a grind, you’ll blink, and the next thing you know, you’ll have a completed book sitting there on the computer, ready to publish and ready to query.
Life goes by fast as, Ferris Bueller says, if you don’t take a moment and appreciate it once in a while. You just might miss it.
It was a wild year on my end. I hope it was a fun and productive writing year on your end.
I hope you have made a lot of progress in your writing, and if you didn’t, then head on over to my website, check out STORY PLAN INTENSIVE (it starts New Year’s Day), check out the FIRST DRAFT group coaching program, reach out to me about ONE-ON-ONE COACHING; let’s make this next year, 2024, an absolutely incredible year for you when it comes to writing.
That’s it for 2023. Happy New Year, my friends. I will see you in 2024 On the next episode of The Writing Coach.
