A Writer's Retrospective: January 2021
New Year’s Resolution month is over. What did you do with yours?
Photo by Jorge Caetano on Unsplash
New Year’s Resolutions are an annual event met with mixed responses. Indifference and derision are chief among them. However, there still exists a group of people that support and evangelize the practice. Such openness to positive change is the catalyst for every good thing that happens in one’s life.
I shared my writer's resolutions later than most do, but they are no less valid. People often feel obligated to delay action until the start of arbitrary time periods be they weeks, months, seasons, or years. Often, it is simply a means of procrastination—a habit with which perfectionists are quite familiar. Though I prefer to plan before I act, I've discovered that I can benefit from simply diving in and iterating.
Resolutions
My resolutions for the year follow:
Read 1 new book per month. (Read 20 minutes per day.)
Write 1 short story per month (min. 3 drafts). (Write 1,000 words of fiction per day.)
Publish 12 articles to Medium publications. (Draft 1 article per week.)
Gain 10 followers between Medium and Twitter. (Post to social media at least semi-weekly.)
Analysis
Read a new book
I failed at my goal of reading a book this month. Some might say that I failed to find an interesting book. As I alluded to in my first newsletter, I did not get through much of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, nor could I stick with Terry Goodkind’s Chainfire. (I got almost a quarter of the way through, so I will check out another of his books later.)
For now, I will work on R.A. Salvatore’s Sojourn. I didn’t finish it last year, but it’s worth a second try. Being the third in The Dark Elf trilogy, of which I’ve read the first two books, there is some familiarity.
I should probably rework this goal. Having a goal of 1 book per month was already an aggressive goal, given how slowly I read (some) original fiction. I should probably make the supporting habit—reading 20 minutes per day—the goal instead. Failing that, I need to analyze my reading interests and better align them to my choices where possible.
Write 1 story per month
This is my tracker for the short stories I’m writing through June 2021. The circled number, 850, is my average word count for the freewriting sessions that preceded the assembly of the first draft. I’m already doing better for the subsequent story at 1,022 words/day.
Screenshot provided by the author.
To write 1 story per month, allowing for time for peer review and editing, I decided to write 1,000 words each day, 7 days a week. (I didn’t write anywhere near that, but I still got the story done.) The goal forced me to:
Write without waiting for inspiration
Generate sufficient raw material
Develop a writing schedule
Use freewriting sessions as the basis of the ideation phase freed me from the “need” to be inspired and to write in chronological order. Also, I discovered it take 90-120 minutes to produce 1,000 words of fiction, since I’m still at odds with putting the “free” in freewriting. Writing 15 minutes on, 5 minutes off keeps procrastination and fatigue at bay.
Some authors (presumably) liken writing to stone sculpting, for which one needs more stone than is in the final product. To this effect, I wrote thousands more words than I needed—enough to have my pick of good words to use in the “official” first draft. In my first story, I struggled with not having enough material because I treated it like a painting. I just kept adding things directly to the first draft—there were no scraps, no cutting rooms. This made both the drafting and editing phases unnecessarily long and difficult.
As for scheduling, I was flexible enough to adjust very early in the month. It only took 2 weeks to figure out that Tuesday and Thursday simply do not work with my schedule. Henceforth, they will comprise my writing weekend. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I start playing tennis and socializing again, but I’ll figure it out then. I am still in the process of formally scheduling the other parts of my writing calendar: editing, critique, social media management, etc.
Publish an article per month
I cheated a bit to make this happen; I wrote a few articles in December to give myself a head start. (Un)fortunately, they all got published, so I have to start over for February. To make matters worse, I have fallen far short of drafting 1 article per week. I have maybe 30 words of nonfiction in a draft right now.
This demonstrates the degree to which my fiction writing efforts have eclipsed my blogging efforts. My newsletter is part of my attempt to curtail this imbalance, as well as an incentive to continue reading and responding to other bloggers. Luckily, I have at least a half-dozen article ideas incubating (at least one of which is likely to be decent). I may have to break out the voice transcription to get some articles drafted. (Regrettably, I find it less helpful for fiction.)
Gain 10 followers
I’m fairly surprised that I managed to get more than a couple followers. Considering that I was only expecting to get 10 this year, it looks like I totally sandbagged my estimate. (I didn’t do so intentionally—perhaps I’m simply out of my depth with this blogging thing.) I’ll have to make 10 followers my monthly goal. The correct thing would be to plot blog growth rates in Excel and use those as my monthly goals. Maybe later!
The supporting habit—semi-weekly social media posts—could use some work. I don’t think tweet-spam will proliferate my work, but neither will silence. I recently decided to employ Buffer for scheduling my social media posts. This way, I can minimize the effort to post to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I still need to decide what to post, however. I don’t want to constantly retweet other authors’ work, but until I have regular output myself, I don’t have much choice.
To-Do
Keep trying new books—finding a book that complements my interests is not necessarily easy.
Develop the rest of my writing calendar.
Publish two Medium articles this month.
Use more trial-and-error in my social media approach. A dud tweet won’t kill anybody.
Hopefully, this monthly review and adjustment of my goals will lead me to success—or somewhere in that general area. What are some of your resolutions? Did you have to pivot on any of them? What habits will you employ to achieve them?