Goals for writers: Staying in your own dance space
Effective writing goals share so much in common with effective story goals. Are you giving yourself agency in your writing career?
Big week ahead: My Story Incubator coaching group is preparing to dig into the nuances of establishing the steely cable of conflict running through their stories. After all, even passive or constrained characters drive their own stories.
When a character is unable to physically act, the story must dip into forces that shift their mindset. Wishful thinking isn’t enough. The character’s internal changes must trigger a transformative arc that continues to propel the plot forward.
And don’t all writers crave propulsion in their writing lives?
As soon as I slipped a hand into my Pocket file for this week’s Writes picks, the selection instantly reminded me how effective writing goals thrive on the same levels of specificity as the goals of our characters.
Is the goal tangible?
Is it measurable?
Is it actionable?
Is it attainable?
Is it timely?
And is it conscious—have you articulated your goal in a way that you can proactively pursue it?
Prepare to supercharge your writing goals, O Writes-ers, as we deepen our practice of The Writes of Fiction.
Stay in your own dance space
When we run into trouble is if we set impossible (or nearly impossible) goals for ourselves and then decide we’re not ‘real writers’ if we fall short.
Usually, when you set a goal and don’t reach it, you’ve done one of three things:
Made success contingent on someone else
Been unrealistic about the time and energy you have to devote to the goal
You haven’t broken it down into something you can track
—Keep reading from Caroline Donahue at Book Alchemy.
More on setting goals: The single most important thing you can do to ensure your success as an author is knowing what that success means to you. If writing or publishing means nothing to you unless there’s a New York City publishing house logo on the book cover, get ready to embrace the long, hard road of querying a manuscript. Likewise, if you’ve spent years pouring out this story and you want full control over the way it’s written, edited, designed, and marketed, the time to stake your claim on that is also now.—Read more at Publishing Options: Which one is right for you?
Coaching questions for your writing self
So good coaching moves away from the idea of teaching: it’s not about transmitting information and existing understanding, not about showing the writer how to do things. It’s about gently opening up spaces in which a writer can begin to see more clearly things which, at some level they may well already know. That might be specifics about a writing project - even maybe a single chapter that’s being particularly troublesome - or broader questions about changing genre, your writing life, writer’s block, or even whether you want to stop writing altogether.—Keep reading from Emma Darwin at This Itch of Writing.
More on writing goals: Completing your first manuscript is a huge creative milestone for many aspiring authors, but the book itself is unlikely to be a publishable success without the experience you’ll gain writing your next manuscripts. If you’ve pinned all your hopes on your freshman effort, what next? Do you abandon your dream because you couldn’t accelerate from 0 to 60 in five seconds or less your first time out of the garage?
Unless your book happens to hit the right desk at the right moment to strike it big, you’re going to need a more granular plan.—Read more at The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Publishing & Editing Goals.
Seeing with an artist’s eye
I’d stress a “gap” in a work is not necessarily a flaw, exactly. LOTR works because it takes a mythic tone—Tolkien was openly influenced by legends, myths, and old epics like Beowulf—that perhaps doesn’t allow the sex, grit, and random chaos of Martin’s world. And vice versa. Imagine if Frodo had just died randomly from a snake bite infection halfway to Mordor! Similarly, the mythic tone of LOTR—where the rightful heir is always good and heroes can kill a million foes without a scratch—wouldn’t fit in Westeros.—Keep reading from Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.
More on archetypes and spaces in between: I’m no fortune teller (and neither do most tarot readers pretend to be, for that matter), but [the tarot] is a downright magnificent way to apprehend influences that inflect your daily life. Like the observations of astrology, these are broad enough to enable you to spy the confluences and influences surrounding your personal circumstances.
Too close to home? You’re not wrong—that’s the power of archetypes. And why not bring that power to your novel?—Read more at Evoking archetypes in writing with the tarot.
Your small press submission checklist
If you’ve decided to forego the agent query trenches and seek a press that accepts unagented work, here’s a checklist to help you compile a submission list you can feel confident in as you prepare to pitch without an agent. … As you go through the checklists below, remove the presses that don’t feel like a good fit at each step in this process. By the end, you’ll have a short list of presses to consider.—Keep reading from Julie Artz at JaneFriedman.com.
More on publishing options: If you’re a first-time author, I recommend doing your best to budget for both developmental editing and line editing. Plan ahead. Save up.
First books are learning experiences. Authors call them “practice novels” and set them aside in a drawer, just as artists stash away experimental pieces that don’t go quite as planned. Without a developmental edit , you might not be able to figure out what parts of your story work and what parts don’t. Without a line edit, you might not be able to spot where your writing is still weak or flabby.
Investing in developmental and line editing for your manuscript is an intense, one-on-one coaching experience in both storytelling and language. Limiting yourself to only one angle will limit the growth you can expect from the editing and publishing experience.—Read more at Developmental editing or copyediting: Which do you need?
I use emojis in certain comments in my manuscript edits to help writers spot patterns: Ooh, another place I need to dive into the character’s thoughts, or Here’s another POV issue. Today, I’ll wrap up our look at writing goals with my favorite emoji, the one I use when a writer has absolutely nailed the storytelling moment.
🎯
Onward,
Lisa
This is The Writes of Fiction, a curated trove of old and new thinking about writing designed to help you get better at writing fiction.
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