2014 Writing Goal: Keeping focused on finishing things while still freeing my ideas

I’ve decided to completely overhaul my writing goals for 2014. The reason I originally created this challenge was to get me to write more and, hey, mission accomplished! Since I started this in 2010, I’ve gone from struggling to average 500 words a day to almost writing 500,000 in a single year in just four years. But while I love the yearly goal instead of a daily one for keeping me writing regularly while still giving me the flexibility to miss a day if needed, I’ve discovered a few big problems I’m hoping to correct with the new system.

These are:

Writing (Photo credit: jjpacres)

• I need to do more real writing. As discussed before, way too often, I end up going for easy words, like blog posts, over “real” writing to hit my quota. I needed to find a way to make sure I don’t neglect my fiction, non-fiction and script projects. Blogging is important, sure, but it shouldn’t ever be a majority of what I work on.
• I need to finish more of my works in progress. The way my system is now, new writing counts much more towards my yearly goal than editing so I almost always opt to work on something new over cracking open something I should be revising. That’s because I only count editing at a rate of 1,000 words an hour to reflect the slower pace and, when you consider that I can write over 1,000 words in a 15 minute writing sprint, editing is a poor way to catch up when I’m behind on word count. (It takes me a quarter of the time to earn the same amount of words towards my goal!) While Big Picture me knows I should be editing, Day-To-Day me just wants the little caught up box to be green so I will always go for the easier way.
• I need to leave myself room to experiment and play. When I need to reach for some easy words to catch up, instead of going for the easy options like blog posts, I need to reward myself for experimenting and working on something fun and random. This is been a bit of a problem for me lately that we’ll cover in a future post but, since I’ve become published, I have a very hard time making myself work on something that I don’t feel like I can sell and that’s bad for my creative life in general. I need to allow myself to write stuff just for the sake of writing again.
• I need to finish MUCH more non-fiction projects. I have less time than ever to work and the only way I’m going to be able to keep my income up is to get more passive income streams out there and my non-fiction ebooks are a big part of that plan. Once I write them and get them out there for sale, they make money in the background without my having to do more than the things I usually do like blogging and social networking. I have been terrible about making them a priority and I have several that I could finish quickly if I could just force myself to finish them.

After much pondering, I’ve finally come up with a way that I think will help me focus my yearly goal into something that better fits my specific needs. Step one is sorting all writing into four main categories.

• Focused
• Finishing
• Free
• Fluff

Focused writing is work on a specific project whether that be a novel, eBook or play. Finishing is editing, revising and rewriting… whatever it takes to finish a given project. And Free is whatever else I feel like working on to keep my creative juices flowing. It’s entirely conceivable for a project to start out as Free when it’s a loose idea, switch into Focused as it takes shape into a real project and then move into Finishing as I edit it all within the same year. Fluff is blog posts, writing and editing I do for friends and other less than ideal ways to build up my word count.

Both Focused and Finishing will be split between fiction and non-fiction with a qualification that, at least for 2014, non-fiction must always be over 50% the total words for both because I need to get a couple of those eBooks done and on sale. I’ll have to make sure that no less than 50% of my total work for the year falls into Focused and Finished which should leave me the option of making a half of the year’s writing go to Fluff and Free (with Free > Fluff, of course) but not overdo it. This should all add up to getting a big chunk of my works in progress list finished or at least closer to finished.

I’m also going to start counting editing differently. I’ll use the old 1 hour = 1,000 words ONLY if the piece drastically went down in word count or if I’m really just reading it over and not doing much writing. Otherwise I’ll just count the final word count of the piece after I’ve edited it. My hope is that this will make editing an easier word count boost so I’ll be more likely to choose it when I’m behind over new writing.

If you’re wondering how I’m going to do this, let’s just say that it’s an EPIC spreadsheet where things turn green when I’m on pace, red when I’m not. I have discovered that my brain is a sucker for the simple pleasure of being on pace and keeping those little boxes green and it’s the main reason I’ve hit my writing goals as consistently as I have in the past. It works so well, I’m trying to figure out how to apply it to everything else in my life. I’d call it gamification but it’s barely that. I just like having a measurable goal and working to meet it.

When I first wrote this plan out, I was afraid that it would limit my writing because it was too rigid but I really think, after a learning curve, it will help my creativity by forcing me to work on a bunch of genres and types of writing instead of always doing the same easy things. I’m hoping that after a while of forcing myself to diversify, I’ll permanently rewire my brain to just work this way without the need of a crazy spreadsheet.

Though, who am I kidding, I love spreadsheets. I’m an excel junkie!

The one thing I am sure of is that this year’s goal will be much harder to hit because of these limitations I’ve put on it. In past years, over half my writing was what would now be the Fluff category and I’ll need to keep that at less than 25% this year. The Fluff was so much easier to churn out when overtired and brain dead so it’s going to be interesting to see if I can force myself to do real writing in that state instead.

So, with all that in mind, what word count goal should I set? I’m going to have to write at least 100,000 Focused words since NaNoWriMo will be 50k of fiction right there and I’ll need to exceed that in non-fiction. If I want to leave myself room to make Focused & Finishing half of the total, that means 200,000 words for the year is the minimum I can do which is terrifying. I had a hard enough time hitting 100k this year and that was with incredibly lax rules.

But that is double 2013’s goal and I do want to keep pushing myself to slowly get back to where I was pre-baby. Considering how I ended up increasing 2013’s goal in the end, it seems a reasonable target. Not to mention that it works out to just about 550 a day, the oft agreed upon ideal daily word count goal. I guess 200,000 it is.

Before I actually start living with this crazy goal, though, I turn to you. How does this goal sound to you? What are the flaws in this master plan I’m missing? Help me kick the tires before I take this new goal tracker out for a spin.