Setting Goals, For Realsies

Do you remember human development classes in middle school? It was in that class that my frizzy-haired teacher passed around half-sheet-sized card stock paper emblazoned in Comic Sans: My Goals. When no one was quick to write any goals down (because, yes, we were in middle school), she gave us a statistic about how middle schoolers with goals were far more likely to graduate high school and not do drugs. Maybe none of us intended on (in my case) reading every Nancy Drew book that had ever been written, or intended on (in their case) skateboarding in every public park in Phoenix, but we rushed to write stuff down because we didn’t want to be seen as ne'er-do-wells (not that we would have known that word). 

Not much has changed. Aside from the fact that I graduated high school and read every Nancy Drew book up until number 40, it has become increasingly clear in the last few years that you need to have writing goals. Your frizzy-haired human development teacher isn’t going to give you half of a page of card stock, and she’s not going to call you a drug dealer if you don’t fill it out (I hyperbolize, but I seem to remember a joke like that).

A writer needs goals, and it can’t be something like, “Finish novel someday.” You need to constantly work toward putting yourself out there, constantly work with at least one project, and constantly have a goal in mind for that project. Again, this goal doesn’t count: “Publish with a big publisher and make it big with little to no effort so that I can make money like James Patterson and hog as much space on a bookshelf as possible, and also possibly afford a vacation in the Bahamas with my tanned girlfriend who only wears Gucci sunglasses that I buy her.” Okay, that may not exactly be your goal, but if we’re being honest, here, you would love it if that happened, and you would love it if you didn’t have to do much work for that to happen. Can I just say now that while dreams are important, unrealistic dreams are crippling?

At the risk of using a cliché, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. (Except I would never eat an elephant, but that’s not here nor there.) Start small, work big.

So in the vein of good intentions, here are my goals:

1.     Finish editing last scene of dialogue. Send finished draft out to publisher I met at AWP.

2.     Finish 3^rd prose poem. Send collection of 3 prose poems to different publisher I met at AWP.

3.     Write short piece on writing. Send to yet another publisher I met at AWP.

4.     Long term goal: Finish novel by the middle of the summer.

5.     Reading goal: Read at least one Agatha Christie for plotting, and read at least one John Green for voice.

Make some goals, my friends -and not goals that just involve you rolling in the dough.