When a Goal is a Stretch
Celebrating unrealistic goals in writing.
🌟 A TIME FOR WRITERS TO REFLECT + ENVISION
Join me and fellow writers for a new year goal-setting session on Wednesday, December 13, 8-9:30PM EST live on Zoom.
If you’d like to write more often in 2024, this session is for you.
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In the spring, I decided I was going to go swimming 100 times this year.
All I wanted was a year full of submerging my entire body in the water. A year of bobbing around and floating. A year of diving into the waves. A year of holding my breath and catching it.
It set this goal because I was on my phone too much. I would spend beautiful Saturday afternoons scrolling instead of swimming. Whenever I did go swimming, I would think, “I like this so much more than scrolling. Why don’t I swim all the time?”
And so I made a beautiful chart. I wrote 100 SWIMS at the top in bold letters. I drew a 10x10 grid of squares. I displayed it on the magnetic dry erase board in my office.
Every time I went swimming, I colored in a square with a different shade of blue. By the end of the year, I thought, I will have drawn a beautiful blue quilt, a visual representation of every swim I took.
Now, it’s almost the end of the year. The water is cold again. And as you can see, I haven’t colored in an entire quilt. I’ve filled in 78 squares.
The sentence you just read is an edited sentence. Before editing, it said, “I’ve only filled in 78 squares.” But “only” has no place here. I put my entire body into water 78 times this year. 78 times, I chose a swim over a scroll.
I don’t care that I didn’t swim 100 times the way I said I would. What matters is this: in intending to swim 100 times, I got in the water 78 times.
I set a similar goal with a novel draft I’m working on. The goal came about when I got an agent and turned my manuscript into her. It was the end of October, and after three years of working on a novel, I was suddenly project-less. But I did have ideas for a new story, and I knew my first draft was going to be bad because first drafts are always bad. I wanted to start on a draft so I could get to the fun part: revising.
“I’m going to write 40,000 words of a draft before the end of the year,” I said. I immediately made a chart. As I’ve written, I’ve colored in squares: one for every thousand words I write.
So far, I have filled in 18 of the 40 squares. In order to achieve my initial goal, I will have to write 1,000 words every single day for the rest of this year without stopping. And I can tell you right now that I’m probably not going to do that.
But in intending to write 40,000 words, I’ve already gotten the hard part done. I got started. The tide curled around my ankles, and I acclimated to the cold. And now, at nearly 20,000 words in, the draft feels more like a freezing wave striking my tummy. I could retreat to the warm shore, but I know how good it will feel to dive all the way in.
💫 WRITERS’ GOAL-SETTING SESSION
I hope to see you on Zoom this Wednesday, December 13, 8-9:30PM EST as I help writers develop energizing (yet realistic!) writing goals for the new year.
I’ll light the way through prompts that will help you figure out what you’d like to achieve on the page in the new year, and we’ll share our goals with one another.
This session is for all writers of all backgrounds who are interested in writing more in 2024, and it’s FREE for paying subscribers of this newsletter.
Paid subscribers will receive the Zoom link on Wednesday. Hope to see you there!