It’s never too late to begin again.
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| Image by vecstock |
Have you fallen short of your writing goals for the year?
I have.
But it’s not too late to salvage the rest of the year and set yourself up for success in the New Year!
In fact, it’s the perfect time to stop worrying about what you didn’t accomplish and start focusing on what you can do.
Wherever you are, whatever you’ve done, you can seize the moment and commit to a new writing goal for the rest of the year. You can pick up where you left off on an unfinished project. Or make a clean start.
Even if you did nothing this year, you can take the time you have left, get your butt in the writing chair, your fingers on the keyboard, and start writing now.
You’ll be surprised what you can achieve.
What can you achieve?
Well, here are my personal writing goals for the rest of 2023. Depending on what you want to write and how much time you have available, your goals may vary.
But don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. You might be surprised what you can accomplish in a small chunk of time, and you might even find it easier to focus for the short term instead of taking on the whole year!
There are 98 days left in 2023, which works out to 14 weeks exactly.
First, I have a work in progress that needs about 30,000 words.
Second, I have a trilogy I’ve been wanting to write. Three 90,000 word manuscripts.
Third, I need to make sure I blog regularly. Two blogs a week at 500 words each and a third, 1000 word blog seems like a great start.
Fourth, I like to challenge myself to write a short story every week. That’s about 5000 words a week. Some weeks will be longer, some a bit shorter, but 5000 is a good average short story word count.
That means I intend to write 30,000 WIP words + 270,000 novel words+ 28,000 blog words + 70,000 short story words.
Total: 398,000 words. Let’s call it 400,000.
Divided by 98 days and we get 4081 words per day.
Multiple that by 7 days and we get 28,571 words per week. Let’s call it 30,000 words a week to make the math easy.
Weekdays, I have a full time job that takes 8–10 hours of my time. But I know I have about 3 hours a day to allocate to writing. I write about 1000 words an hour, so Monday through Friday I’ll write 3000 words a day. That accounts for 15,000 words, or half of my weekly goal.
That means I need to get 15,000 words on the weekend.
Well, I can stay up later on Friday nights, so I can get another 2000 words there.
Then, I can spend my Saturday afternoon, about 5 hours, writing, so that’s another 5000 words.
That leaves 8000 words for Sunday, which means eight hours of writing on Sunday. A full work day. But I’ll break it up into two or three, maybe even four sessions, depending on what else I have going on.
That’s 30,000 words a week, and 30 extra hours of work on top of my typical 45 hour work week. That might seem like a lot.
There are 168 hours in a week.
I’m committing 75 of them to work and writing.
And I sleep about 7 hours a night, or 49 hours a week.
So 168 total hours –75 hours of work and writing–49 hours of sleep still leaves me 44 hours a week!
I can still go to the gym (6 hours), go out on Saturday night (6 hours), have date night on Tuesdays (4 hours), movie night on Sundays (6 hours), and have 22 hours left over for commuting, reading, self-care, and general miscellaneous downtime.
I’m not recommending you try to write this much.
But I do recommend you examine how you spend your time, and imagine what you can do with your writing if you manage your time better and commit to getting your butt in seat more often.
You might be surprised at what you can accomplish if you eliminate distractions and get down to business.
Who knows? Maybe you’ll even finish that novel.
