Writing Goals and Targets

How to make it less stressful

I’ve been writing my latest novel since November. I started with a few scenes, and then spent some time planning the structure of my novel, before starting the first draft. Recently, I realised I was wandering slowly through it rather than getting there at a reasonable pace. It was April and I’d only got about 15,000 words down. I was telling myself it was OK to go slow, that I’d get there eventually and the first draft would be all the better for it because I was taking my time.

WRONG! I realised I was slowing down so much that I was never getting in the flow. I was dragging my heels and getting nowhere fast.

So a couple of weeks ago, I decided to set myself a writing goal. The goal was to finish the first draft of one timeline of my novel by the end of May. (My novel has two timelines - I’ve set myself a rough 40,000 words for each timeline). Then in June I’d write the second timeline.

I googled how to make a nice chart to monitor my progress, because I like to have a visual aid to motivate me. During NaNoWriMo* last year, I enjoyed being able to type in my daily word count and see a lovely graph depicting my progress.

I won’t go into the details of creating the chart, but I followed the basics of this lesson then tinkered with it to get a graph I liked.

I soon realised that this graph only motivated me when things were going well. I missed a couple of days writing, and the lovely purple line of actual words (which should’ve been above the pale blue ‘target’ line) was now dipping, and I was a couple of thousand words behind. Urgh.

So what to do? I told myself it was OK and it was my deadline so I could extend it. I extended it to the end of June, which I calculated was only about 390 words a day. That seems doable, and now my purple line is wandering above the blue line quite happily. I like to see that I’m ahead of myself, I find that far more motivating. And I know if I miss a day I can easily catch up.

This is what my graph looks like now. Ahhh, so pretty…

One writing friend says she likes to set herself the target of one word a day. She finds that very motivating as she always ends up writing more than one word. I told her that’s great, but it wouldn’t work so well on a graph!

At the end of the day, if you’re setting your own deadlines, go easy on yourself. Figure out what motivates you and plan accordingly. You might find it more motivating to be behind and want to catch up – that way just isn’t for me, I prefer to be ahead.

What motivates you? Do you have any tips? I’d love to know!

*NaNoWriMo stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’, which goes on every November. The aim is to write a novel (50,000 words) in one month. There has been some controversy with the official NaNoWriMo organisation which I won’t go into here. I won’t be joining the official organisation this year but I still plan to write a novel in November with my local writing group.