writing goals Archives - The Creative Writer

What is it about the New Year that makes it such a new start? September can seem to take on this role because of the children changing classes but it seems that January 1^st is much more motivating every year.

It’s time to evaluate what you have been doing with your business in the previous year and what you want to do with it this year. The best way to do this is to write your goals down.

Although the past year has been reasonable, it could have been better. My first goal in 2012 is to find more regular clients rather than one-off clients. I hope to achieve this by targeting my markets better and offering regular services such as producing newsletters and writing blogs rather than just articles. I enjoy doing newsletters for various subjects and have the right software to produce a good proof as a PDF which is acceptable to most printers.

My second goal is to take some time for myself creatively. There are other markets that I would like to get into but to achieve this, I will need to put some time in on my own work so that I can polish my writing and bring it to the right standard. This may involve changing some of the things I do on my website, but not immediately.

My third goal is to ensure that a good work-life balance is struck for me. There have been some issues on the domestic front recently that may involve some decorating work which has the potential to affect my work time. I will need to find a way to balance this to ensure that work is regularly coming in.

And finally I would like to attend the occasional networking event this year so that I can make some face-to-face contacts.

How about you? What are your goals this year? Let’s check back in six months and see how they are going!

Career Center: A New Year’s Resolution for 2012 – Tips for a Better Legal Career (abovethelaw.com)
New Year, New You (magnahealthblog.wordpress.com)

Planning for Writing — Photo by Agirregabiria

You’ve written down some goals in a notebook, but then what did you do? Close the book and go do the washing up? Have you taken any steps towards realising those goals? Or have they lain forgotten in the hustle and bustle of daily life?

It is not enough to write your writing goals down. It’s a good start. You’ve given the matter some thought. Now you need to think it through a bit more.

Go back to where you’ve written your goals. Rewrite out the first goal again. Now, underneath it write out two or three actions that you need to take in order to make that goal happen.

For example, you might have a goal to have a piece of your own writing printed in a magazine. In order to achieve this, you might:

Write in to an Editor on a Letters’ Page for a local or national magazine

Decide to write two queries a week to magazines that you read and are interested in

Decide to buy a book on querying magazines and read it through, acting on two pieces of advice.

You will notice that my ideas for acting on your goal are quite specific. Breaking it down into small steps will help you have an incentive to act towards achieving your goal.

The initial goal was vague, just a possibility. The ideas for achieving that goal make it more likely that you will achieve your goal and gives you not just one, but three different ways of making your goal happen.

Give yourself a time frame where you will come back to your goal and assess where you need to take it next. Queries to magazines take time to compose and many are rejected. In order to increase your chances of being accepted, then you will need to keep sending them out.

Now, go. Write!

Tag: writing goals

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Assessing Your Writing Goals

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