Goals, Deadlines and Dead Men

On Wednesday, I ran into the problem that plagues all public writing events: the dreaded realization that I’d bitten off more than I could choke down my already-packed writing schedule. And its sister realization: I will need to scale back my goals. By admitting it publicly. I could imagine the cheers and boos at my next check-in.

I am, of course, speaking of ROW80, A Round of Words in 80 Days.

Dan and I decided to explore new writing communities at the beginning of October. I thought that an alternative to NaNoWriMo might help me jump start my writing (because, frankly, November can fuck itself. Dan has made the case that writing can be equally difficult throughout the year, but November offers its host of unique challenges to someone who has been a professional / grad student for seven of the past ten years.) I discovered ROW80 through Chuck Wendig’s Twenty-Five Things You Should Know About NaNoWriMo list. The novelty of its name drew me in. The length of the challenge (80 days) and the flexibility of its goals (completely up to the individual participant) were right for my needs.

I decided to give it a shot, fired up WordPress, and resurrected my long-dead blog.

Two weeks into the event and there are extra poems plumping up my journal pages. However, for two weeks’ worth of check-ins, I have come up short to my weekly goals. Really short. The pressure is building to reevaluate my goals and possibly change them. Because ROW80 isn’t a four week event, even blowing weekly goals for the first two weeks could result in finishing the event with my original goals well in the bag. So why bother scaling back only two weeks in? The deadline itself is so far away (December 22nd!). Isn’t that giving up?

Goals vs. Deadlines

As I wrote in Why Do You Write, Part Two, writing to deadlines can be one of the best motivation tools for a writer. You have a date that is a cut-off point for your creative exertions. The deadline gains its power by being an immutable event. Passing the deadline with work unfinished is to be marked. You are a dead man if you aren’t finished.

To combat the procrastination that arrives bundled with your deadline, the weekly (or daily) goal the tool that guides your writing output. By its nature, the goal is not as dire as the deadline. It is the template that we use to chart our uncertain progress. Goals are meant to encourage and challenge us; to escort us as smoothly as possible to the completion of any ambitious undertaking.

For those of us who write in more than a single-month sprint (where a come-from-behind win can leave you flush with success), the repeated flouting of goals can lead to a pattern of negative reactions to our work. When week after week passes with goals unmet or ignored, something has to change–the goal itself, or the writer’s attitude towards it.

It boils down to the question, would I rather feel good about surpassing an easy goal or feel kind of shitty about not living up to a strenuous goal? Which of these feelings actually motivates me?

The answer to the question is (like all things worth doing) complicated by the particulars of the event and of my attitudes towards goals.

The Event Itself

ROW80 is a writing contest that takes place over the course of 80 days. There are somewhere between 80 to 120 participants checking in each week. It’s a small circle that allows you to get to know several other bloggers well. It’s highly advised that you also have a ROW80 Buddy, who will be down in the trenches with you, checking on  your progress, supporting, cheering, and mocking along the way.

The goals are flexible. The hook for ROW80 is that people with busy schedules need to have realistic goals. You tailor the writing to a sprint or a leisurely stroll, state your goals publicly, link to them using the ROW80 Blog Hop and then check-in once or twice a week on Sundays and Wednesdays to announce to the group how you are progressing.

Some shoot to write every day, some set modest weekly word counts, others for specific number of minutes spent writing per day. Most participants have concurrent goals that are only tangentially related to writing (e.g. to read/comment on fellow participants’ blogs)–and some goals that have nothing to do with it, except perhaps to make a positive life change.

I respond to word counts, so I decided to set a word count goal. Because I write poetry, 50,000 words is unthinkable. I chose a word-count goal for ROW80–5,000 words or 100 poems in 80 days. My secondary goals were to write a blog posts twice a week, and to do something creative each week day.

What’s happening goal-wise?

To meet the goal of 100 poems in 80 days, I have to write at least 10 poems a week to hit the final goal by December 22nd. This is an incredibly ambitious goal, as I wrote one poem in seven days for week one, and eight poems in seven days for week two. The 5,000 word goal also seems to be a pipe-dream; many of my poems do not break thirty words. Writing posts has proven to be much simpler. I write a guest post for the Surly Muse each week, and a single check-in post for the Dusty Journal on Wednesdays. Doing something creative every week day has been off-and-on. Some days I have been entirely swamped by the mundane emergencies that motivate the working world. This goal is more of an intention than something measurable, and I don’t plan to drop the intention to do something creative each day (even if it doesn’t happen).

How do you evaluate Goals?

At the two-week check-in, ROW80 asked us to evaluate our goals according to the SMART rubric. Are your goals Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely?

Specific: Hone in on what you want your goal to be. “Writing every day” is not very specific if you have a particular project to work on. “Writing a blog post every day” or “working on my novel every day” are far more preferred as goals. They offer you less room to wiggle out of your goals (“I wrote a grocery list today! That’s writing, right?”)

Measurable: Something quantifiable. I think quantifiable goals are good when you have a specific project to work on. However, non-quantifiable/non-specific goals such as “doing something creative every day” makes room for non-quantifiable tinkering, daydreaming, journaling, drawing, and other creativity that I like to infuse my life. The thing is, don’t go crazy with specific/measurable goals or you lose out on the creative sparks that often start your projects that do require specific/measurable goals.

Attainable: Can you reach your goal, in the most perfect of circumstances?

Realistic: Can you reach your goal, given your schedule demands or your inability to take advantage of every free second (which would be all of us)?

Timely: Can you make these goals happen in a timely fashion? Can you meet your goals every week, every few days, or every day? What is the block of time that you need to schedule around?

According to this rubric, my goals are specific & measurable, and in some universe attainable (I have written 100 poems in 80 days–10 years ago) but not realistic according to my recent output.

If I have set a non-realistic goal for myself, what should I do?

I can either spend the next eight weeks watching myself miss goals or spend the next eight weeks meeting reduced goals. While the reasonable thing to do would seem to be jump on the “change your goals” bandwagon, there are some things that I need to consider before moving the goalpost.

Since I have participated in large-scale writing projects before, I know how I have reacted to meeting/missing goals in the past. If you haven’t noted your behavior in similar situations, trying to achieve unrealistic goals might help you discover how you react to both big and small goals. Instead, you could just imagine how you might react in such situations. It is helpful to write out possibilities.

These are the possibilities that I see happening:

Three Possible Reactions to Missing Unrealistic Goals

1. Because I miss my goals every week, I begin to tell myself that it is “okay” to miss goals. I no longer try to achieve this goal. My writing becomes unfocused and unambitious. I end the event with far fewer poems than if I had just written poems at my normal rate (which is about 1 -2 per two weeks).

2. Because I miss my goals every week, I try to make up lost ground later in the competition. This interferes with other creative goals. I sacrifice time to other projects. I am somewhat happy to meet my ROW80 goals, but I have put aside equally-important creative endeavors to achieve this success. To add insult to injury, I have forced myself to write more than I am reasonably inspired to write. I write a lot of junk poems to finish the competition.

3. I make time out of my free time / relaxation time to write more poems. I strive to achieve my weekly goals each week, even though I am behind. I write more poems than I would have otherwise; my desire to “make up” for missed goals gives me a large number of poems at the end of the Round than if I hadn’t joined the competition. Most of them are not junk.

Two Reactions to Meeting Reduced Goals

4. Because I meet my goals every week, I do not try to write more poems once I have hit my quota. I am satisfied to write at a reduced rate. I finish the event with more poems than if I hadn’t participated, but I have also missed out on a chance to push my writing outside of my comfort zone.

5. Because I meet my goals every week, I am not unhappy week after week as I watch myself falling further behind my (completely arbitrary) initial goals. I finish the event with more poems than if I hadn’t participated. I feel energized by my successful participation in ROW80. Because I am writing to a realistic level, I do not have to sort through a disheartening large number of junk poems.

What do I see happening?

As a writer (and as a person), I am motivated by feeling that I need to catch up to a goal that has been set in front of me. Seemingly insurmountable goals makes my surly muse sit up and take heed. If a goal is demonstrably flexible (that is, if I change a goal mid-stream), I become less invested in it. Once I know that a goal can be bent, my mind will find ways of bending it again. I will make excuses and not achieve more than what is in front of me.

Therefore, I see option (3) being the most likely outcome of having unrealistic goals, and option (4) being the most likely outcome of realistic goals.

Based on my overall goal (to publish another book of poetry at the beginning of 2012), I want to have as many good poems as possible by the end of ROW80. To make that book a reality, I feel it is important to push outside of my comfort zone.

It has been several years since I have tried to write at my full potential; so much of my energy has been going towards professional/grad school (especially in the past two years), I no longer have a good idea of what my maximum capability is for writing. It would be in my best interest to try to achieve unrealistic goals than to settle for more realistic ones. So those unrealistic goals? I’m going to be keeping them. I’ll endure the weeks of feeling like I am not measuring up for the single week where I do.

Clearly, this conclusion is specific to my circumstances. What is your reaction to unrealistic goals? Realistic ones? Which outcomes motivate you? The desire to catch up, or the pleasure in exceeding your own expectations? Do you work best when you achieve small goals, or when you chase after sky dragons?

 

Guest Post: Why Do You Write? Part One

It was balmy March afternoon in 2008 that I sat down to chat with my good friend and writing support group of one, Dan Swensen. At the time, my main energies were directed towards posting on message boards about writing. I had set aside my habit of daily journaling.  It had been years since I had written a poem, and more than 18 months since I’d even sniffed at a short story. With a tinge of sadness, and a feeling of defeat, I remember typing, “I’m not a writer. I haven’t been for a while now.”

Those words crushed me, as I had stumbled across a fundamentally true thing. A writer writes. They don’t just read books about writing, they don’t just chat about writing, they don’t just make plans about writing. A writer writes something. I wasn’t writing anything.

This epiphany ate at me.  I’d like to say that I went on a writing tear, that my entire attitude toward writing transformed. No. It took a few months. And when I started, I started small. A few poems while I was doing live-in work in Idyllwild. Then, a few articles for a creative magazine.  A few more poems. Another pause. A few more years.

It wasn’t until this January that a question reared its head and demanded my full attention. “Why the hell am I not writing?” The fuller implications of this question were, “why are you letting bad workshop experiences limit your creative output? Why are you letting your old work languish? Why are you not actively shaping your creative life?”

This second epiphany lightened the heaviness of being a failed writer that I had been carrying with me. To be a writer, all you have to do is transform motivation into writing through the alchemy of keyboard, pen, paper.

The key that I had been missing was motivation. The reason I’d been lacking it was because I had a dearth of honesty. I had not answered the very simple question that big mucky-muck writers and writers down in the trenches get asked but few answer in a comprehensive way: “why do you write?”

Why do you write?

This seemingly simple question actually has three components to it (hence the likelihood of getting an abbreviated answer when you ask your other writer friends): “what are your general goals for your writing and/or what do you hope to get from your writing,” “how did you get started writing / why do you continue to write,” and “why do you write a particular project.”

So. Why do you write?

It is vitally important to be honest here.

If your answer is full of fakery and pretensions towards art, fame or money that you don’t actually want–or are able to achieve–there will be a nagging gap between the work you are doing (or procrastinating) and your ultimate goals. The greater share of writers that I have known have been filled with anxiety over their ability to achieve either artfulness in their writing, or the ability to feed themselves with their work. Then I left workshop, and met writers unconcerned with either goal; these writers worked (one, two, three) other jobs, and tried for skillful writing, but didn’t erect A LIVEABLE WAGE or the PROGRESS OF ART as their goalposts. And they were all the more successful (according to their goals) for it.

You are courting disaster if your goals even include a seemingly more modest goal of WRITING A POPULAR NOVEL. Basing your goals on the tastes of audiences is like drying your laundry in an oncoming storm. Some novels are popular; most are not; and even if you write something popular, chances are slim that you could ever name-drop your novel at a party or a twitter feed and get hushed and reverent responses. It is a far easier goal to “write a novel that has wide appeal/large possible audience,” since that goal makes no presumption of popularity–only of its potential to be popular.

Setting goals that you can live with, and that reflect your desires is the key here. Sometimes finding a goal you can get your mind around is as simple as figuring out the proper way to get at your goal.

I write because I want to wrangle the chaotic thoughts in my head and make something meaningful to others from that. I write poetry because, frankly, I have issues with brevity. I like cultivating this habit in myself.

 

So. Why did you start writing?

It’s a common experience for writers to get started early in life, but there are hundreds of path into the craft. Perhaps you started writing because you always wanted to live the glamorous Hollywood life of an out-of-work screenwriter. You needed to find a sense of closure from traumatic events. You were dying to rail against the exponential witlessness of pop-culture commentary. A person’s history layers new motivations onto the original writing impulse, making each person’s reason for writing a story itself (and is possibly the reason why so many first novels out of workshops have protagonists figuring out how/why they want to write as a part of the main plot).

I was good at writing when I was a kid, and it snowballed from there. When I discovered that I lacked the attention span to make novels, I settled on poems–then grew to love their gem-like qualities. My attitude toward writing changed dramatically during college; some of this story can be found in past articles on writing workshops at the university level, some of it opens this article.

I keep a running tab of places where I’ve talked about my writing history, because the story changes each time. Details are dropped or remembered. Different writing influences are foregrounded. Mentors’ advice seems more or less meaningful based on current experience. How you tell this story to yourself affects how you think of yourself as a writer. If you think your story is, “I’m a failed writer who couldn’t make it in workshop,” that is the kind of writer you will be. If you change that story to, “I am a writer who was failed by workshops, and now I need to remedy that,” suddenly the possibilities open. It may seem pedantic to you to talk about writing this way–but I guarantee that if you are not aware of the stories that zip through your mind at laser speed, you will be unaware of how pervasively they affect your entire enterprise of creating.

I cannot overstate how important it is to know thyself, writer.

Sit down with a journal / word processor / blog and make a narrative about your journey with writing, and don’t pull any damn punches. I dedicate a couple page in the back of my journal to evaluating my progress each year, usually after a major turning point in my writing. Major turning points are when I decide to start a new project, finish an old one, shelve a project indefinitely, start a new blog, explore a new genre, find a new writing group.

Keeping abreast of all of your writing activities helps with your honesty. If, like me, you bemoan the lack of writing in your life, then discover that you spend all of your time blogging, commenting, Twittering, guest posting, updating LiveJournal… clearly you are writing. Your issue may  simply be a matter of the type of writing that you are doing.

 

So. Why do you write the particular project that you are currently working on?

If there is one take-away from this post, it should be that specificity and honesty are your most important tools. While it is important to understand your impulse toward writing, it is equally important to understand why you are embarking on your specific project.

In my estimation, the reasons for working on a project boil down to four big categories: “because I can,” “because I want to,” “because I need to,” and “because I have to”.

Because I can. This category roughly covers the reasons that roughly begin with a, “why not?” or “why not me?” XX wrote the great teenage vampire-werewolf romance novel and made cash hand-over-fist, why can’t I do the same? I have a bunch of XX lying around, why don’t I collate it into a publishable book? I wrote an excellent post on XX the other day that got a lot of response from my readers, why don’t I write a book/blog/series of vignettes on that?

The “because I can” category is the weakest of all categories for sustaining a project, because the motivation dries up once the novelty wears off. Once you decide to write that novel in Reno just to watch it die, it’s important to keep the drive alive by making provisions for it in one of the other categories. That is to say, once you’ve decided on a a project (a novel, a collection, a screed) just because it’s something you can do–you need to own the project. You need to become invested in it by igniting a genuine desire to see the project through. This can often be achieved during the falling-in-love brainstorming stage, where adding more detail or researching new facets of the project bring you new sense of pleasure at your choice of project.

If the project fails to captivate you on a basic level, you should move on. A project that fails to interest you at its outset, and continues to fail to interest you as you get deeper into planning it, won’t bring you closer to any of your writing goals (unless being bored with your art/craft is one of your goals!). Readers can sniff out a writer doing it without passion (although faked passion will do in a pinch, if you have a knack for that). For writers who have gone through higher education, writing without passion is one of those habits that we have picked up, like tics in an open grassy field, and you seriously need to divest yourself of notion that a project will magically become interesting to you on page 200 if it isn’t already interesting to you by page 20.

If you insist on pursuing a project where the motivation never materializes, you need to impose deadlines on yourself as though the project were any other must-do task. I suggest treating the project like one of a client-designer relationship: set hard dates for various parts of the project, try various permutations of your subject/theme/project out until you settle on something you can live with, and make sure there is a critical eye on the other end that can evaluate your total work.

Because I want to. This category is probably the most familiar to us as writers. I write because, hell, I like the feeling of sitting down to a blank page and defacing it with words. I actively pursue that feeling by creating projects that will allow me to write, scribble, doodle to my heart’s content.

But “because I want to” is much broader category than simply wanting to write. It also includes wanting to say something, do something, or demonstrate something. And it is the category that writers, flush with the giddiness of having put something on the page, often have no clue about. Especially because, much of the time, a writer has no clue what she/he has written until someone gives feedback on the project.

Two examples will illustrate my abstract ramblings. Swensen and I have both suffered from this set-back. A couple of years ago, I was editing a fantasy piece for Dan that was eventually going to become a large world-building novel about a group of soldiers who were deep in a guerrilla war with another race. When I asked him why he had stalled, he mumbled something about having an issue with what his story was trying to say. He wanted to work on a project that expressed something beyond, “this was a cool story about soldiers. Badass.”

I was stumped by Dan’s trouble. It was pretty clear to me that he was writing a fantasy novel that was borrowing literary tropes from war novels to make a more realistic, less high-fantasy-feeling setting that ultimately decried the war and violence that other fantasy novels glamorize (or at least make highly desirable).  When I told him this–he was equally stumped. He didn’t think he was writing that at all. These newly uncovered themes rose up dauntingly on the page. Did he want to write a novel with such weighty concerns, especially since the indelicate handling of topics about soldiering and warfare could bring criticism from a pool of readers he never even considered (the war novel aficionados)? Could he possibly do justice to these tropes, which were admittedly far outside of his areas of interest?

While I felt Dan’s anxieties were unfounded, they arose because he genuinely did not know what he wanted out of his writing. The project was eventually sideburnered in favor of his current project, now in its second draft. Dan figured out what he wanted to do/say with this new project, and felt the scope of the project was manageable to him. Ultimately this novel succeeded where a more ambitious (and less desired) project did not.

My problem was a bit different from Dan’s. I didn’t have the motivation to even attempt a book, even though I was sitting on a cache of poems that were begging to be edited. I had been discouraged by writing workshops, where I had been repeatedly shown the door and told to try a different genre. My writing didn’t fit anywhere. I became convinced it, therefore, fit nowhere. I stopped pursuing poetry because I convinced myself to stop wanting that.

In the end, the anger of deferring to authority sat up and demanded to know why I convinced myself not to want this. I wanted to be a published poet. I could taste the desire (it was a bit tangy). Once ignited, that want-to impulse sustained me through a self-imposed deadline of three months from inception to completion; writing, editing, and manuscript design on the back of grad school, teaching, and deteriorating health. The want-to was born from the desire to show the amalgamation of every polite workshop rebuff that I wasn’t the nothing voice. The work amounted to about 2 hours of writing, editing, and design on the project per day. The magic simply was that I would sit down at my keyboard and get something done even on days where I was tired to the bone.

I know that many writers have buttons that activate see-this-through-anything mode. If you are honest about who you are and what you want (and take the time to reflect on these questions to find these things out), it is possible to find the fire/drive to see projects through. The tricky part comes when you need to yoke that fire to a project that might otherwise seem marginal to you.

While Dan has said that being alone while you write is one of the most fundamental truths of writing; to me, the most fundamental truth is that you must learn the alchemical transformation to generate motivation even when you are staring down into the source-water of your anxieties, goals, and desires.

That does it for part one. In part two, I’ll tackle the remaining “Because you need to” and “Because you have to” reasons, and tie everything up with some peppy words about motivation and deadlines.