Welcome to the third of my 'pivot from the past into the future' newsletters. Last time, we discussed how small wins matter and how they include personal goals such as improving our health and environment.
Now it's time to talk about professional and creative goals. Like a Venn diagram, these may intersect in your life. You may even be in the lucky position that your creative goals are your professional ones if you are one of those increasingly rare mortals who can make a living out of writing full-time.
Most of us, though, don’t do that. This doesn’t make us lesser mortals – not at all. It could be argued we are greater mortals, because we lead multi-stranded lives. We have to earn to put food on the table and we may not be able to do that by writing alone. Our writing, indeed, may be doing absolutely nothing to make the coffers bulge.
Today and tomorrow I’m going to look at these twin areas of work and creativity to see how we can balance and reconcile the two. I’ll mention a couple of my own goals. Regardless of whether at the end of the year I’ll have completed all (or any!!) of those goals I do find it helpful to sit down and list them. It gives me clarity and starts the process of prioritising what is truly important to me. Remember, it’s not about the sheer number of plates you spin. It’s about focus and progression – even tiny amounts of progression – rather than stagnation and self-blame.
Start by taking stock of the creative side of your life right now:
Review your writing projects
I’m guessing you have more than one! Most writers end up with one or several works in current production, plus there may be projects that petered out because you lost interest or faith in them or Real Life, that well-known bully, barged in and shouldered you away from them. There may be completed projects sitting in the proverbial bottom drawer – maybe you tried to sell them but nobody was interested.
List them:
- Completed stories
- Partly-completed stories
- Potential stories – titles, ideas, themes that are in your mind
On each of the next few days take up one of these lists and consider what to do:
- Is it worth reviving that old completed project, editing it or rewriting it, taking it to agents again? Or is its time truly over – not wasted, remember, because you learned from it?
- Those partials – how much would it take to get back momentum and see them through? Be harsh if you have to be: are you still keen to finish? Or are you writing in a genre that isn’t really you or for a market whose day is done? Does the project need to be put on the back-burner or even into the bin? Or, as you look at it, do you feel a renewed interest – even a hunger to get going and cover that last mile to the destination?
- Those ideas – which of them has true potential? Do you feel that one of them could be the one? Does it have contemporary/cultural/market relevance right now? Have you been fired up all over again by seeing a title or notion you jotted down months ago and had forgotten? If so, can you write down a brief outline of where a story like that might go? Can you imagine who the central character might be or where you might set that story? Do you find yourself jotting down bullet points but they are turning into sentences? Yay! Go for it!
Writing isn’t just about writing – you know that too. As you review your position, consider these aspects – they are also part of the creative process:
- How much of your week, every week, will you devote to production of new original work?
- How much ‘trigger work’ do you need to do? That means brainstorming (known to lesser mortals who don’t write as ‘daydreaming’ or ‘doodling’). It means doing background research or visiting locations. It also means learning or adding to your craft skills.
- With each potential project consider how you would feel if by the end of 2017 no further progress had been made. Consider the risks of delay, such as loss of market relevance or the loss of the ‘fizz’ you felt when you first had the idea.
Once you have a list of your writing projects/tasks and the back-up work needed to complement the creativity, create a hierarchy:
- What is your major project/goal for the year ahead?
- What are your lesser projects/goals?
- What are you going to take on this year – and what can you postpone to next year?
- Within this year, which project/goal will you tackle during the first quarter of the year, the second, and so on? Write this down.
- Will your productivity be helped by interweaving – by moving between bigger/lesser projects or between creative/trigger tasks? Or do you function better if you are single-minded and stay with one task through to its end before moving to another?
- Time: will you time-block within a day or week, allocating specific times to specific tasks, or will you prefer focused ‘burns’ where you think of nothing else and drive on through until that individual task is done?
- Accountability: will you keep your plans to yourself or will you have ‘buddies’ who can support, nag, encourage you?
As for me …
My creative goals include finding more time for research work, publishing a follow-up to An Oxford Vengeance and learning how to say ‘No’ to new work commitments, just occasionally …
Tomorrow, how to review your professional life and harness strategies from it to help your creative output.
Warm wishes,
Lorna
P.S. You can still visit https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/2YSJDBV to help me plan future Fictionfire events and services - I'd be most grateful for your input.
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