Write More with a SMART Goal

So you want to write more. You want to write more regularly, write a higher word count, finish a big project, or form a writing habit. While it is a noble ambition that you perhaps resolve to do every new year or even the start of every month, it is just as easy to slip up and fail.

Maybe you’ve heard it before, or maybe you haven’t, but it’s been proven that the most successful goals are ones that are precise and have a plan to back them up.

This guide will help you create a writing goal using the SMART model.

SMART is an acronym for goal setting that was first introduced in 1981 and has had the letters stand for different things over time. For the sake of this article the terms we will be applying are:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Relevant

Time-Based

Specific

‘Writing more’ and the other goals listed in the introduction are not specific. They are the exact opposite of specific, being vague as heck. Writing more in whether word count or time, or writing more regularly, are completely subjective to the person who says them. Your ‘more’ is different from my ‘more’ because we both have different starting places and expectations for ourselves.

You may have a sense of what you mean by ‘more’ in your head, or you may have no sense at all, but either way, you need to specify it.

What is more? Is it writing daily? Is it writing to a certain word count? Is it finishing a certain number of projects?

You can’t succeed at ‘more’ if you don’t have a parameter of what ‘more’ is. The first step in creating a writing goal that can succeed is making sure there is a finish line that equals success.

In summary: step one, specify you’re ‘more.’

Measurable

As writing is not an actual race with a defined finish line on the horizon, you have to set the finish line. You do that by making your writing goal measurable. And I know numbers are not stereotypically one of writers’ favorite things, but get ready to apply some numbers to your goal.

For example:

‘I want to write one short story per week.’

‘I want to write for at least thirty minutes five days a week.’

‘I want to write 100,000 words in creative fiction this year.’

Failure and success (or in less harsh terms, falling short and achieving), is really easy to tell when you have a standard to measure your writing up again.

Also, having those measurable goals gives you the motivation to keep going just a little bit longer. For example, if you have a 1000 words a day goal, and you are at 900 before burning out, you might just force yourself on so you can reach that finish line.

The second aspect of making your goal measurable is to keep track of those measurable qualities. It could be as simple as writing down how many words or how many minutes written in a calendar, list, or excel spreadsheet. Or it could be using an online tracker like writetrack (which is what I use for tracking word count). There isn’t a right or wrong way to do this, just finding a method that works for you and whatever you’re tracking.

In summary: step two, figure out what you are measuring and how you are going to keep track of those measurements.

Achievable

Making writing goals achievable can be split into two subtopics: making the goal achievable and planning the ways you are going to achieve it.

Most of us writers have day jobs as well as other responsibilities that eat up our time and energy. We don’t get to sit in a cottage on the seaside for uninterrupted weeks and write hours every day with no other worries on our shoulders. Writing five thousand words a day is unrealistic for most writers, especially most writers with a day job. There is a reason why NaNoWriMo with its 1667 words a day goal is even a struggle for most of us.

Set yourself up for success but setting a specific, measurable goal that you can realistically achieve. Even if it is a modest 300 words or fifteen minutes a day. With regularity and dedication, even those modest amounts will add up. Of course, on the flip side, there is nothing wrong with pushing your limits and challenging your abilities as long as you are thinking about it in terms of long term sustainability. Burning yourself out is counterintuitive to long term writing goals and writing habits.

After you select an achievable goal (which is okay to modify as time goes on, but more on that later), come up with strategies for how to achieve them. When and where are you going to find time to write? Will it be waking up earlier? Using your lunch break at work? Cutting down on your youtube watching time?

Ask yourself what has proven to be your biggest hurdles in achieving your writing goals and come up with solutions to work around them. This exercise from author C.S. Pacat is very useful for determining writing roadblocks and coming up with solutions.

In summary: step three, be honest with yourself to come up with a goal that is a balance between practical fit in your life and a challenge; follow that up with coming up with tactics to achieve it.

Relevant

You want your writing goal to be relevant to what you want to do as a writer.

Maybe your goal is to finish a specific project or focus on a certain type of writing. Maybe you are more concerned about the time of ‘butt in the seat’ writing or maybe you are more concerned about word count or maybe your care less about word count but want to focus on quality. That’s all up to you, just as long as your goal aligns with what is relevant to your ambitions.

Determine what writing is going to count toward your goal. Maybe you want all writing of all stripes to count. Maybe you only want fiction writing to count. Whatever it is, make sure it relevant to your overall ambitions as a writer (and there are multiple ways to interpret that for yourself) or you could be leading yourself down the wrong path.

In summary: step four, determine what type of writing/writing activities count towards your goal and what doesn’t.

Time-based

As you may have noticed in the example of writing goals under ‘specific’ and ‘measurable’ there was a time-element in them. How much you want to write in a day, a week, a year, and so on. Having a time element in your goal is part of establishing your finish line of success.

One of the best ways to involve timelines in writing goals is to pick a long term goal and split it into smaller term goals. For example, picking how many words you want to write in a year and then splitting that into smaller, more manageable goals that have to be met at smaller landmarks. Writing 100,000 words in a year and breaking that into writing 300 words a day or 2000 a week. Or like how NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words in a month split into a suggested 1667 words a day.

The benefit of this is twofold. By splitting the large goal into smaller goals you are setting up a strategy to get to the large goal. Having a larger overall goal allows room for you to slip up on the small goals (because life happens) because you have wiggle room to catch up.

In summary: step five, determine the timeline for your writing goal. For maximum impact, split a larger writing goal into smaller, more manageable parts.

After

After creating your SMART goal, it is of course time to put it into practice. Achieving your SMART writing goal will still take dedication and hard work, but by setting yourself up for success by both defining what is success and coming up with tactics to reach it you are many steps closer than before. Feel more than free to adapt the goals in terms of time, amount, or strategies as you learn more about what writing practices and schedules work best for your process. SMART goals are just the structure and you still get to do what you do best as a writer: fill in the blanks.