The holidays have been a time of eating too much delicious food, enjoying your new presents, and generally lazing around. But come January 1st, a lot of us feel energized to start making New Year’s resolutions. We pledge to exercise more, eat better, and create other good habits.
Unfortunately, this will to commit to better behaviors usually leaves us by February, and we go back to how we were doing things before. It just gets too hard to go out to the gym or eat one salad after another in the cold winter months.
I urge you not to let the winter blues get you down and stick to your goals—especially if they are writing goals. New Year’s is a great time to list out your writing aspirations for the year ahead. As someone who had made many writing New Year’s resolutions, I can share some tips and tricks that have helped me accomplish those goals.
Here’s how to set writing goals for the New Year and stick to them.
Recognize Your Accomplishments from This Past Year
The first thing to do when trying to come up with writing goals for the New Year is to look back at all you accomplished this past year. You may have finished a manuscript, self-published a book, or started posting a serial online.
Of course, your accomplishments may have been on a smaller scale than that—but you should take every bit as much pride in them! Maybe you wrote an outline for your book, or simply came up with the idea for one. If you read at least one book, that also counts (as we’ll discuss more below).
Before you start tackling your goals for the year ahead, it’s important to celebrate your accomplishments from the year before. It will also help you to determine realistic resolutions for you to make for the New Year.
Dream Big
All right, now it’s time to start thinking about your goals for next year. When you first start thinking up those resolutions, you should dream as big as you can. That might be finishing your first book, or submitting to agents. You may want to see a movie adapted from one of your books. No dream is off-limits here.
If you’re having trouble coming up with those big, writerly dreams, you can set a timer for five minutes and try to crank out five ideas. Sometimes it can be hard to admit what we dream of in our hearts of hearts for our careers as writers, but this is the time to let those desires loose.
We’re going to break these dreams down into more manageable pieces in the next section, but you may want to keep this list of big dreams as goals to strive for in the more distant future.
Narrow Things Down, and Be Specific
Now that you have those big, pie-in-the-sky goals written down, it’s time to narrow things down into specific, manageable pieces. If you wrote down “write my first book”, your first goal might be something like “brainstorm an idea”. Each step of the process should feel like something you could reasonably accomplish.
If all your mini goals add up to more than you could do in a year, that’s okay! In fact, it’s pretty likely. All you need to do is shrink your goal down a bit to something you could handle in a year. Later we’ll discuss more about how to reasonably schedule your time.
Be really realistic and specific here, both in the mini goals you set and how long you think each one will take you to accomplish. This will help you to achieve what you want without putting too much on your plate.
Gather Your Tools
Writing tends to be a solitary endeavor, but there’s no reason you need to toil alone! There are plenty of great writing and self-publishing blogs out there that will help you on your way. Before you start your writing or publishing journey, it would be a great idea to find some blogs and/or newsletters and soak up the advice they offer.
Other writing tools include research tools. Before I started writing my historical fiction WIP, I spent weeks reading books and articles to research my story. That time spent scouring books and the Internet proved invaluable once it came to actually start writing, and made the process so much easier.
Gathering your various writing tools will help you to feel prepared for the road ahead.
Set Reading Goals
As said earlier, reading a book is totally a writing goal. Reading a novel will help you to learn about the craft of writing. As you read, take note of what you do like and what you don’t like. Then work to emulate your favorite aspects of the author’s writing and avoid your least favorite ones.
This is another goal where you should be realistic. If you read all the time, then you may be able to read something like a hundred books in a year. But if you barely have any time for reading, you may want to commit to something small like ten books or reading for fifteen minutes before bed.
The books you read don’t have to be new either—feel free to enjoy a book you’ve already read. In fact, I believe you can learn more about writing by rereading an old book than by picking up a new one. Here’s a post about the benefits of rereading novels to improve your writing.
Find the Right Writing Environment for You
When making your writing New Year’s resolutions, it’s important to figure out the best writing space(s) where you can be most productive. You may be lucky and have a whole office in your home for yourself with a door that shuts and walls you away in your own little writing oasis.
For the rest of us, our writing spaces may be more like a desk in your bedroom or a table at a coffee shop. No matter where you regularly write, there are ways to help spark creativity and guarantee a productive writing session.
Here’s a post on how to make your writing environment conducive to creativity.
Make a List of First Steps
Once you have your tools, writing space, and a list of bite-sized, manageable goals, you can start making a list of actionable steps you can take toward achieving the first goal on the list. Think long and hard about each thing you will need to do in order to tackle this step.
Say you want to write an outline of a new story. First, you might want to research outline templates (there are links to a ton of great ones in this post). Then you may want to decide if working on your laptop or a notebook will work best for you. If you’re going the notebook route, you may need to buy one, etc.
Breaking your goals down into simple, actionable tasks will make them seem easier and less overwhelming.
Figure Out a Schedule (and Stick to It)
One crucial part of making your writing goals for the New Year is setting a schedule. This means carving out a few hours each week when you can sit down and write with minimal disturbances.
This is yet another time to be realistic. If you’ve got work during the day and kids to care for in the morning and at night, you need to work around all that. One popular way to deal with a hectic schedule is to try getting up an hour earlier—you’d be surprised how quickly you’ll get used to it. Another thing you can do is sacrifice some of your Netflix time and write instead.
Setting a regular writing schedule will help to keep you productive as you strive to meet your goals.
Set Deadlines
I know deadlines are not most writers’ favorite thing, but if you want to stick to your writing goals for the New Year, it’s important to set them. For your larger goal, you may want to set your deadline for finishing your new book on December 20th, 2023. Then you can go through your smaller goals and set deadlines for them too.
This is a great time to use a calendar. Whether it’s Google Calendar on your phone or one you hang on your wall, it will help to remind you when you have a deadline coming up. On Google Calendar, you can set an alarm so the calendar reminds you a few days before your work is due to be finished.
Setting regular deadlines will help to keep you on top of your work. Before you know it, you’ll meet all your goals right on schedule.
Write Down Your List of Goals
When you have all your goals finalized, don’t just keep the list on your computer or phone. You should make a physical list of them and hang them somewhere near your laptop or in your workspace. Make sure it’s somewhere you can easily see it.
Then, whenever you meet one of your goals, you can cross it off the list. You have no idea how satisfying it feels to put that line through one of the items on the list. And when you look at it now, you’ll be able to see the progress you’re making.
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you’ll be able to use these tips to help create a list of writerly goals you can achieve in 2023.
Soak Yourself in Fiction
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