setting goals

At the onset of this Writer’s March Challenge, I wrote about Dorothea Brande and the “Will to Fail,” a concept based on Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” that seeks to name the human propensity towards self sabotage. As I explained,

Each person has a dream, a goal, an internal sense of what would make their lives better (their own will to power, so to speak), but each person’s will to power [is] usurped by the stronger will to fail.

selfsabotageyoursuccess Many people have watched Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech, a video I shared and discussed many years ago. In this speech, Gaiman talks to a group of graduating art students about how to make it as artists in today’s world. He tells them to always keep in mind what they have at the top of their mountain (their life goal). Then, when faced with choices on what to do next, he said, keep in mind this mountain and choose options that will take you closer to the top. And so, put another way, the “Will to Fail” involves all the life choices we make that either take us down or away from our mountains. It also (perhaps most importantly) asks us to examine all the reasons we stop climbing altogether.

So, what do we do to avoid this “Will to Fail”? How do we overcome it? In other words, I keep hinting at Brande’s formula for success, but have yet to offer it up. And so, I offer it now. As Brande Says,

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail.

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Since last year’s Writer’s March, I’ve been thinking a lot about goals. What makes a goal “Good”? For the purposes of this Writer’s March, I would like to define a “good” goal as a goal that is, above all else, “achievable.”

4 things to keep in mind when setting your GOAL

Start Small but Don’t be Afraid to Push Yourself

If you aren’t already writing daily, don’t jump into five hours/day. I was writing an hour a day consistently, and when I bumped myself up to 90 minutes, I struggled to keep it. I grew discouraged, and as a result, I stopped writing. Don’t let that happen to you. If all you can do is 15 minutes/day, don’t be afraid to say it. Chances are that you’ll write for much longer anyway. Remember, the purpose of Writer’s March is to find a way for writing to fit into your life. They say that it takes 30 days to create a habit. Why not make the habit a goal as well?

That said: whenever you sit down to write, aim for more. Can the 15 minutes become 30? Can the 30 become an hour? Just because you’ve set a goal, doesn’t mean you can’t surpass it at every chance you get.

Be as SPECIFIC as Possible.

They say that goals are better achieved if they are measurable. In other words, if possible, make your goals concrete. Here are some of the Current Challenger goals posted so far:

Melanie Unruh’s Monthly Goal: To write 4 stories in the month
Lenore Gusch’s Monthly Goal: To write a short story
Teresa E. Gallion’s Daily Goal: To write a poem a day

What I envy about those training for marathons are the way they are always advertising their running times and training schedules. Ran six miles today. Ran ten miles today. Think of the daily goals as the same thing: what are you doing each day (writing and for how long?), and what is your version of the marathon (a novel, a story, a single poem)? And don’t forget: the act of building a writing habit is also an excellent monthly goal.

Once the Goals Are Set: Keep Them!

When I was at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference in 2010, the question posed at every reading was this: What is the best writing advice you’ve ever been given? John Dufresne, fiction writer and author of Is Life Like this?, gave this advice: KEEP YOUR BUTT IN THE SEAT.

These are words I have heard so often I can no longer count them. The first time was through Greg Martin in a Creative Non-Fiction workshop. Greg advocated for a minimum of 3 hours/day for his MFA Graduate students. He firmly believed that even if you couldn’t write a word, you had to sit there anyway. As Greg put it, you are training your body to write the same way a runner trains his/her body. You sit there staring so that the next time, when the inspiration strikes, you are ready for it. If you’d like to hear more about Greg’s theory, you can visit his famous TREADMILL JOURNAL (for writers).

And finally: Don’t Let the Goal Stand in for the Task

Derek Sivers in this Ted Talk says it best:

According to Sivers:

“Repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal make it less likely to happen. Anytime you have a goal, there [is]…some work that needs to be done to be done in order to achieve it. Ideally, you would not be satisfied until you have actually done the work, but when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that…the mind is tricked into the feeling that it’s already done, and then once you feel that satisfaction you are less motivated to do the hard work necessary.”

In a way, perhaps this Ted Talk is saying that Writer’s March is a bad idea. But I don’t think you have to look at it this way. Especially when, at the end, he says that if you must say your goals out loud,

state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction. Such as, I really want to run this marathon so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don’t, okay?

In others, rather than focusing on the end result, focus on the difficult path (because writing daily is not easy). But whenever possible: STAY SILENT. For my purposes, I’ll keep my thoughts about my novel to myself. And if you must talk about your writing, why not talk about Writer’s March (…ahem…shameless promotion…)