Writing in the New Year

            Well, it’s the end of another year. I don’t know about you, but the time blew by! It didn’t feel like the days passed as quickly when I was a kid, but now as a college student, it feels like we jump from August to December within a few days.

As many writers do, I’m sure you are approaching the new year with many hopes and dreams. Perhaps you want to write a book, or maybe you have and you want to get it published. There might be a writing competition you want to enter, or you want to build a website or start a blog. A new year is full of new opportunities, and most people treat it as a clean slate. We can do anything.

Going into 2024, I knew I needed to start taking my writing career seriously. Before, I only wrote when I could and often took breaks from writing when I didn’t feel like it or if I was being lazy. But if I wanted to be a writer and publish a book when I wanted to, I had to make goals for myself and keep myself accountable to achieve those goals.

In this post, I will provide a guide on how to create and achieve your writing goals for this next year. If you know how to create reasonable goals and how to keep yourself encouraged, motivated, and disciplined, then you can accomplish what you want to and when you want to.

Determine your goals

            The first step is, of course, to determine your goals. There are plenty of books and articles on how to create goals, so all I will say is that your goals must be reasonable and chronological.

By reasonable, I don’t mean that you will write five books and get them all into stores this year (unless you are capable of doing so, and if you are, I highly respect you). Think of goals that you know you can achieve. For example, two of my goals were to write a book and then send a query letter to an agent. Notice my goal wasn’t to land an agent, but just to send out a query letter. Sometimes landing an agent takes time, and if I didn’t land one by the end of the year, I didn’t want to be devastated.

When creating your goals, remember that some will take more time than others. If you plan to write a 100,000 word novel, that may take you the better part of the year. Landing an agent and a publisher (if you choose to traditionally publish) takes many more weeks and even months. Make sure that you aren’t putting too much on your plate. Otherwise, you may feel overwhelmed and disappointed instead of happy about the things you did accomplish.

Your goals must also be chronological. My goal was to start an author account on Instagram, but first I had to get a personal Instagram account because I had no idea how to work social media. I also couldn’t start a blog without building a website, so that became another goal. When you create your goals, make sure there aren’t any other big steps you have to take first. Each large step should be a goal itself so you can make sure you have time to finish everything.

If you are looking for some writing related goals, here are some things you can do:

-        Create an author social media account (or if you have, find a way to make it grow, or consider expanding to other channels).

-        Build a website

-        Create a blog

-        Write a book

-        Self-publish a book

-        Write short stories to publish on Amazon or other websites

-        Guest blog for other websites

-        Send a query letter

-        Land an agent

-        Land a publishing deal

-        Edit your book

-        Create a writing journal

Notice that these are goals and not resolutions. There is a difference. Goals are things listed above that take time to achieve. Resolutions are things like “I will write every day” or “I’ll make a blog post every week.” I mean, it’s good to be consistent, but people have a habit of breaking resolutions by the end of January (if they make it that far). These goals should be things you achieve throughout the year, or perhaps you have one big goal that will take the year to achieve.

Keep your goals visible

            By visible, I mean write down your goals and put them somewhere you won’t forget. When we create a goal in our minds, we tend to forget about it, especially on busy days. As the year wears on, it moves to the back of our head until we forget it completely.

            Write your goals down. I kept my goals in a writing journal (which I talk about in my post “Should You Have a Writing Journal?”). You can keep them in a journal, on a corkboard, on a sticky note on your mirror, anywhere that is within sight and somewhere you know you’ll visit often. Since I kept other things in my writing journal, I knew I would see those goals often. Now you can’t say you “forgot.”

Keep yourself accountable

            Accountability is very important. I have discussed it in past blog posts, so I won’t go too into detail, but the only way I was able to complete my novel and build my website in a timely manner is because I posted on my social media that I would accomplish those things by a certain date. If I didn’t, I risked disappointing my followers (as well as myself). Another way I kept myself accountable was by writing a monthly report in my writing journal. That way, I could see what I accomplished and what I failed to do so I would (hopefully) do better the next month.

            I’m not saying you have to blast your goals on social media. I know some goals are personal, or maybe you just don’t like sharing a lot online. But find a way to keep yourself accountable so you can get things done. Trust me, it helps.

Deadlines

            Giving myself a deadline to finish a goal also helped me strive to work toward it. My goal was to finish writing my book by the end of summer, and as that deadline approached, I realized I needed to hustle a bit. When I planned out my goals, I did not place deadlines on them at the time, but as I got farther along into the year, I realized I needed to do so. It is a way to stay organized and also make sure you are not finishing the final three goals during the last week of December.

            Though you create a deadline for yourself, don’t be afraid to keep it flexible if you have a good reason to miss it. I said I would finish editing my book by the end of October, but I was so swamped with homework and busy with other life things that I ended up finishing in November. It pained me to miss that deadline, but I had a good reason to. Work hard toward your deadline, but if something in life or work comes up that cannot be ignored, move your deadline a little bit to accommodate. As long as you are still working to achieve that goal and your other goals, you’ll do just fine.

            The new year is full of possibilities, and no one knows what will happen. Writing in the new year is exciting because you don't yet know what you can accomplish (and I'm sure it's a lot!). If you know what you want to do and you find ways to keep yourself accountable, you can certainly achieve those goals. Even if you don't reach all of them, you can at least be proud of what you have done and know that you worked your hardest.

2024 was a year that taught me how to work hard and achieve my goals, and I want to repeat that in 2025. So who’s with me?