Are Daily and Weekly Writing Goals a Necessity?

Photo credit: stargardner on Flickr

I wrote not too long ago about the usefulness of keeping track of your word count progress, so I
thought it appropriate to cover an equally important and related topic—that is, daily writing goals.

I’d read early on about the importance of keeping a daily writing goal, and I have to say it’s probably one of the most useful bits of writing advice that I’ve ever followed.

You see, before I kept daily writing goals, I suffered from pretty frequent writer’s guilt. I would write, but even after a particularly successful writing stint, I would wonder if I’d written enough. Truth be told, no amount ever felt like enough—I always finished thinking, I could write more. 

Needless to say, it made writing needlessly difficult, as I was never sure if I’d made enough progress. It wasn’t until I started to set a daily goal that I was truly able to appreciate my progress and feel accomplished after a successful writing sprint.

In addition to helping to eliminate writer’s guilt, maintaining a daily writing goal accomplished something else as well—it encouraged me to write every day and make consistent progress on my manuscript.

Now that I’ve pretty near perfected a daily writing goal that works for me, I actually keep two goals—daily and weekly writing goals. Allow me to explain.

Using Scrivener (although a calculator would work just as well), I know that in order for me to finish the first draft of my current WIP by the end of the month (or at least reach 70k), I currently need to write 1,723 words every day, or 12,061 words a week. Because I’m an overachiever, I aim for about 2,000 words a day, or 14,000 words per week, which gives me a little extra wiggle room in case the sekrit project turns out to be longer than I anticipated.

The benefit of maintaining a weekly writing goal is again to fight writer’s guilt. If I miss a day, or even two, I know that I have the rest of the week to make up the difference, which usually equates to a couple hundred extra words a day. Nothing to sweat over.

The main idea behind daily and weekly writing goals is to train you to write every day—or at least as consistently as you can realistically manage. In order to use these writing goals most efficiently, there are two rules to follow:

1. Set realistic goals. Look, I’m more than well aware that not everyone can expect to churn out 2,000 words a day, and that’s totally ok. Everyone has different circumstances, and if yours make it difficult to meet more than 1,000 or even 500 words a day, then don’t set your goal for any more than that. There are few things more discouraging than setting a goal impossible to meet, so instead start with a goal you know you can meet. Start small, and if you find you can easily meet the goal, then try bumping it up a little. Everyone has a different golden number—the key is just finding yours.


2. Don’t guilt yourself over not meeting goals. Life happens. Inevitably, you’re going to eventually miss a day, or several days. You may find that you can’t meet your weekly goal one week, or you may discover halfway through the month that you’re behind schedule.
   
   It’s ok. Don’t beat yourself up over what you haven’t accomplished—instead, look at the progress you’ve made. Even small progress is progress—even twenty words added to your WIP are twenty words you didn’t have yesterday.
   
   If you find that you’re consistently missing your goal, then don’t sweat it—it’s probably a sign that you might want to reevaluate your goal. Set the quota a little lower and keep pushing forward. You’ll make it as long as you keep writing.

Do you keep a daily or weekly writing goal? Why or why not? 

Twitter-sized bites: 

Why one writer lives by daily and weekly writing goals while first drafting. (Click to tweet) 

Do you keep a daily or weekly writing goal? Here's why you may want to consider it. (Click to tweet) 

Are Your Characters Beautiful?

Photo credit: catherinetodd2 on Flickr

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like half of novels out there with any type of romance have a subplot that goes like this:

In a world, where a beautiful woman falls in love with a Greek-God-of-a-man, the future for their offspring looks freaking gorgeous.

You’d think the whole world was made up of Bradgelinas in these books.

I’ll admit I’m guilty of having physically attractive protagonists and love interests—which isn’t a bad thing (to a point). Readers like to imagine gorgeous protagonists just as much as writers like to write them—it just becomes noticeable when either a) everyone in your book is gorgeous or b) everyone good in your book is gorgeous and all of the bad guys (or less important people) are meh.

Let me clarify—I’m not saying you’re doing something wrong if your book falls into either one of those categories (I’ll readily admit more than a few of my WIPs certainly do), it’s just something I’ve started to think about lately and I’m going to address it in my future WIPs.

Because it turns out, just like in real life, what makes a character beautiful isn’t always a symmetrical face or toned body—it’s their personalities, their actions that make the readers fall in love with them.

What I find especially interesting is that books with characters that aren’t described as gorgeous often end up with readers who fall in love with them anyway and think the characters are hot. (Beth Revis talked about this in a very interesting blog post you should all check out).

Why does that happen?

Books allow us to do something that movies don’t—while movies show us what everyone looks like and paint a picture that we can’t ignore, books allow us to create our own images. Maybe the future love interest isn’t gorgeous…but as he does things that show his inner beauty, readers start to amend their mental image of him (or her, for that matter). A character that started off as ok physically, may end up looking straight-out beautiful by the end of the book in a reader’s mind.

Inner beauty trumps a less-than-perfect physical description.

I’m not saying you should stop writing beautiful characters—I just think we need to consider more about what makes a character beautiful. What does that word “beauty” mean anyway? I don’t think it always has to apply to something physical, in fact, I think it’s even more powerful when it doesn’t.

We live in a world where physical beauty is coveted—but to create a world in our books where there are no imperfections is unrealistic and shallow. Most of us agree, I think, that inner beauty is the more important of the two, so why not show our readers that it’s possible to fall in love with someone who isn’t physically perfect?

That kind of love story may be the greatest of them all.

So that’s my opinion, but what do you think? Am I underplaying the importance of physical beauty, or does inner beauty really trump all?  

Finding the Time: A Challenge

First and foremost, a million thanks to the amazing Lyn Midnight for presenting me with The Versatile Blogger Award yesterday. YAY! I feel like I just won an Oscar. I’d like to thank the Academy…

Kidding! On a more serious note, I’ll be passing it along myself later in the week to three fantastic bloggers. So more on that later!

Now on to the main attraction.

Many of those who’ve never written a novel like to think that those who have must have all day to just sit around and write. “How nice,” they think. “I wish I had the time to sit down and write a book.”

Truth is, we don’t have any more time than anyone else. As much as we’d like it, writers aren’t gifted with the ability to cram more hours into the day (though if anyone figures that one out, totally let me know).

This is no secret to us writers. Finding the time to get words on paper isn’t an easy task. If you’re a student, it means writing before (and sometimes during) class. If you’re working full-time, it means getting up early to get some words in that WIP, or staying up late in the night to finish that chapter. When your friends are going out for the weekend, sometimes it means staying home to edit yesterday’s writing.

Fact of the matter is, we all have lives. We have friends and family and work and school and a million other responsibilities that compete with the time we have for writing. Some days it’s impossible to get anything in, and that’s ok.

The best writing advice I ever read was simple: make a writing quota and stick to it.

For me, it’s writing 1,500 words a day or 10,500 words a week. If I miss a day, which happens, it’s fine because I know I can make it up another day. As long as I make 10,500 words a week, I’m happy. And if I don’t? That’s ok too; I can make it up the next week.

The daily/weekly writing quota has helped me finish many a manuscript. It keeps me honest, and it saves me from the guilt of wondering whether or not I wrote enough that day.

Even more recently however, I discovered something that changed the way I approach writing completely. There used to be a time when I’d sit down and write until I met my quota. This was painful. Some days it’d be easy and I’d be done in no time. Other times I’d sit at the computer for hours, checking every five minutes to see how many words I’d written. This led to screaming in frustration when after an hour I only wrote 500 words (or on really rough days, even less *shudder*).

It turns out, you DON’T have to write it all at once. Whoa.

Let me say that again: you DON’T have to write your quota all in one sitting.

My new method was stemmed from a little beauteous Twitter hashtag known as #wordmongering. I intend to write a full post on this later (because it’s just THAT amazing), but it’s basically a thread where writers get together at the beginning of every hour and write for a half hour, then compare word counts. We cheer each other on and there’s virtual confetti.

Ok, a LOT of virtual confetti. Like an ocean of virtual multicolored strips of paper. Though that may be partially (read: completely) my fault.

Anyway, its effectiveness blew me away. Writing in spurts, it turns out, is much less stressful than trying to get it done at once. With just a few half-hour rounds a day, I’ve been able to get my word goal down without a problem.

So. If you haven’t assigned yourself a word count, I challenge you to do it. Try it for a week. It could be a 100 words a day or 5,000 words a week or 15,000 words a week. Whatever it is, stick to your guns and get it done.

You just might be surprised by how rewarding it is.

So let’s see it! What are YOUR word count goals this week?