How to Achieve Your Writing Goals in 2023

We all want to achieve our goals in the New Year. That’s why we set them, but how can we avoid falling into the same old ‘new year, new me until February’ cycle that seems to plague us all every year?

The biggest piece of advice I will always give someone when they ask how they can achieve their writing goals is the same as you will find for any type of goal you may want to set.

Set. Realistic. Goals.

If I want to set a goal to read more books in 2023 I’m not going to set the goal to read 300 books in the year. Though this goal could be reachable if all I did was read Goosebumps and young children’s books, the huge tomes and BookTok selections that line my shelves will feel sorely left out.

I set my reading goal at 52 books for the year because I believe reading one book a week is a realistic goal I can set for myself so that I won’tt stress too much if I fall behind at some point in the year. I can always catch up on vacations.

Here are three ways that will almost guarantee that you will meet your writing goals this year.

Develop A Daily Habit

You can’t reach your writing goals without writing and you won’t write if you don’t make it a habit. If your goal is to write more, finish that novel you’ve been typing away on for years, or improve your craft. Making and developing a DAILY writing habit is going to be one of the ends all be all of your writing goals.

Set a goal to write and stick to it. Mark it in your calendar, set an alarm on your phone, and make sure everyone who could interrupt you knows that this will be your Do-Not-Disturb writing time.

Write five minutes every morning while you wait for your coffee to brew.

Write as you wait for the shower to warm up.

Write as you wait for the bus, at every red light, or even when you go to the bathroom instead of getting lost in another episode of Candy Crush.

Sure some of these aren’t the best habit to make, but they are better than the excuse that you just don’t have time to write there is always time. You just have to stop leaving writing as the last thing on your to-do list and bring it into the first or second position. You can walk the dog, but after that, you write.

Study The Craft

You can’t write if you don’t read.

I’m not saying you need to pick up the first copy of ‘How To Become A Best Selling Author’ you see on your local bookshelf. (I’m really not, please don’t waste your money.)

This advice is simply to read so you can write.

If you write fantasy, read fantasy. If you write romance, read romance. If you write crime thrillers, read science fiction. If you read science fiction, read horror.

You don’t have to read in your genre though it may help you when developing skills of pacing and making you aware of tropes and elements within your genre. You can learn writing from reading any work of literature even fanfiction counts and I will die on that hill.

Reading is like taking a front-row seat at a conference held by an author you can hold in your hand. You will learn how they write dialogue, and how they develop their story structure from pacing to character growth. You can and will learn more by reading a dozen books than you ever would taking a dozen creative writing courses.

Seek Rejection

This is advice to myself and you my fellow writer.

As writers one of the things we fear most is rejection so why would I be telling you to go out and seek it?

How many times did you fall before you finally started to walk?

When you first were learning to ride your bike you feared falling and scraping your knee, but when you finally got that first scrape you may have cried and thought that you would never ride again, but then you did it anyway.

The only way to get over a fear is to come face to face with it. Sure the cuts on your knees will hurt anew every time, but you will no longer be afraid of them. You know they will heal and you’ll enjoy your ride until the next one.

If you are self-publishing your work and you fear the rejection of readers have a few friends or critique partners read your work first and go from their feedback to the group of strangers you fear.

If you are hoping to publish traditionally well the only way you’re going to do that is through the submit, reject, submit cycle. You might as well start it now. Your book will never be perfect for you, but it may be enough for them.

One rejection isn’t the end, even one hundred rejections aren’t the end. Each is an opportunity to learn from and try again and again and again. Someone out there is just waiting for your book to come across their desk and be exactly the story they were looking for.

The only way to achieve your goals is to know what they are and actively work towards them every day. Your book isn’t going to write itself, but maybe you could write a book about a book that could.

Best of luck and keep on working toward your goals.

With love,

B.K xoxox

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