#44: Goals, Not Resolutions: Setting Outcome and Process Goals for Writing
Plus some of my favorite books of 2023—and a few to look forward to in 2024.
Happy new year! Here’s hoping that your 2023 ended well, and that 2024 becomes a better year for you, your loved ones, and the world at large.
In my last newsletter (which was not last month, as usual, since I took a Substack break during end-of-semester/holiday crunch), I wrote about some of the crossover lessons I’ve found between my writing practice and my running practice. As you may recall, one of those was my recent tactic of breaking my planning for a race down into outcome goals and process goals, a tool I’m starting to bring into my writing life as well. As 2023 comes to a close and I start looking toward 2024, I thought it might be useful to formally write out a plan for the writing year ahead, and to share how I go about thinking through my goals at this stage of my life.
Let me say upfront that my approach probably doesn’t work for everyone: I think explicit goal-setting makes some people nervous or worried about feeling guilty later, and of course there’s a whole anti-New Years resolutions vibe out there these days. I get it! All I know is that for me, having clear, actionable goals helps me orient myself around the achievements I want to chase and accomplish: over and over, I’ve learned that once I announce a specific goal (even if only to myself), the rest of my life will move in its direction. I should also add that this goal-making is, for me, always combined with a healthy amount of preemptive self-forgiveness: if I set a goal of finishing a book by August 1, I do everything I can to make that happen—but if I miss? Then I change the goal to December 1 and go after it with the same intensity. For me, goals are targets, not arbiters of my self-worth or anything else. If I miss my target, I pick another one farther down the field and try again.
In the past, my writing goals have mostly had the flavor of so many maligned New Year’s resolutions: a little vague, lacking details or any real plan. “Finish my next book.” “Find an agent.” “Publish six stories.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with these goals, except that they don’t tell me anything about how to achieve them.
What I like about the outcome goal/process goal approach I mentioned last month is that you end up with a concrete plan in service of your overall desire, plus a set of steps you can execute in order to reach that desire. The trick to it is that both the outcome goals and the process goals have to be things you can conceivably control: “sign with an agent” isn’t as good as “publish a book” which isn’t as good as “write 50,000 words.” I may want to sell a book for a half-million dollar advance next year, but that’s an outcome that’s awful hard for me to manifest directly, no matter how hard I work. Even “finish my next novel”—which almost certainly is my truest goal—is a little nebulous, because sometimes you work very hard and the finish line still eludes you. (Ask me how I know.) Writing a book is rarely a linear process, and pretending it is can be a source of misery for many writers.
In my own writing life, I’m currently torn between two book projects, one long, involved one that I’ve been working on for several years, and another newer one that’s started to take up more and more of my brain space. (Essentially: one book in deep revision, one book still in a first draft.) Writing two books at once is probably a disaster-in-waiting (for me!), but if you asked me right now which one I wanted to work on more, I’m not sure I could tell you. So let’s set my main outcome goal for 2024 without specifying a particular book project:
Outcome Goal 1: Write or rewrite 100,000 words of fiction
Well, that’s a big number, isn’t it? It certainly seems so when you put it down in bold, and I almost immediately revised it here, because I can feel half of you (or all of you?) rolling your eyes. But it’s really only a huge number if you try to do it all at once. This is where process goals come in: you break the big goal into more achievable, more imaginable chunks. So let’s do so.
)Before moving on, I’ll also note that this could all be inside the same project, across multiple drafts. If I finish a first draft of a 6,000-word story, and the retype/rewrite it completely, I’ll count that as 12,000 total words. It’s all pretty arbitrary, so I’ll just adjust the “rules” so they make sense to me as my needs change.)
Process Goal 1: Write at least 500 words a day, five days a week
When I teach novel writing, this is the pace I ask my MFA students to aim for during the semester we’re working together. 500 words works out to about two pages of double-spaced Times New Roman, and that seems like a pretty achievable amount to get down in a single session, even if you think of yourself as a particularly slow writer.
If this process goal happens, then the outcome goal will get checked off with no problem: 500 words five times a week works out to 2,500 words a week, which adds up to 130,000 words a year. I can miss my process goal for twelve weeks and still hit the mark I’ve set—which means it’s actually a pretty conservative goal, if I believe that in 2024 I can be a person who might find a way to focus long enough to write two pages every time he sits down.
Process Goal 2: Once you start writing a scene, don’t stop until change or action appears
Of course, there’s not much too point in penning 100,000 words of disconnected, plotless fragments. (Or at least there’s not for me, at this stage in my particular projects.) As those of you who’ve read Refuse to Be Done know, I’m a fan of exploratory, playful first drafts, full of Robert Boswell’s “half-known worlds,” driven by Charlie Smith’s idea of “writing the islands”—but from experience I also know that sometimes the material produced in this manner can be too fragmentary or unfinished to easily arrange later. If you let yourself skip around in the narrative or to write fragments during a first draft—and again, I usually do—it’s possible to produce a lot of pretty sentences in which nothing much happens, something I’ve definitely been guilty of in the past.
I can’t find the source anymore, so it’s possible I’m misattributing this, but I believe I once heard Will Chancellor (author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall) say that he doesn’t let his writing day end until he’s made something change in the story. I’ve always loved that metric for being “done” with a scene, and it’s one I’m going to try to stick to myself this year, in hopes that it’ll help me keep driving the plot forward, no matter what I’m writing. Change begets more change, and the more of it there is from scene to scene, the more dynamic the story. My hope is that my trying to keep to this standard will make for better drafts this year, as well as a clearer path through the cause and effect of the stories I’m working on.
Process Goal 3: Update my writing log daily
I think most successful people benefit from some combination accountability partners and systems, regardless of what they’re pursuing. Certainly I do! For writing, this can be a friend (writer or not) who you regularly check in with about your writing project, it can be a person you share pages with it, it can be any of the numerous apps that might help you track your progress, or anything else that works for you. Perhaps an intricate system of rewards and punishments, if you’re that sort of a person! But what’s worked best for me—probably because it’s easy and doesn’t require anyone else—is keeping a very simple writing log.
For many years—ever since doing Nanowrimo in 2004?—I’ve used various spreadsheets to track the words and hours I write every day, as well as capture a short reflection on the day’s progress. These days, my log looks something like this:
Very simple, very easy to get filled out at the end of my writing day! I’ve used other systems I liked a lot—most memorably, keeping a paper, handwritten log that I updated every day, often over a cocktail—but basically everything else I’ve tried was fussier than just dropping the numbers into this spreadsheet, which meant I sometimes skipped it. But the spreadsheet I can do every day, and so usually do.
Here’s the real trick with this particular accountability system: you have to fill in the zero days, on the zero days. This is what keeps it pushing me along. I hate typing zero in these columns, especially multiple days in a row. I hate writing little excuses for myself in the comment box. Sometimes I start to justify a zero day, and instead I go, Ah hell, I can write for thirty minutes right now. And then I do.
When I teach novel writing to my MFA students, I require them to try a log like this for the duration of the semester, and I’d say that 50% of the students do it dutifully and claim to get something good out of it, 25% hate it/refuse to try, and 25% are complete converts who go on to make it a part of their writing life in a way that far outlasts the program. (I know some students who graduated years ago are still updating their log from a novel-writing class a decade ago.) All I know is that this works for me, and it’s been a good way to keep myself moving. (There’s more on this in Refuse to Be Done, if you’re interested.)
If you’re curious about trying out my writing log template, you can find it online here. You won’t be able to modify the template directly, but click “Make a Copy” and save it to your own Google Drive, after which will be editable.
I have some other goals for this year—including a similar outcome/process set for my reading—but I’m sure that you get the idea by now. Hopefully this glimpse at my planning process is useful to you in thinking through your own year ahead, as you aim yourself toward what you want to achieve, create, and experience. But obviously, this is just one approach to organizing the work of writing, and it’s certainly not for everyone. Take what’s useful and toss the rest!
If you want to share a one of your own writing-related goals in the comments, please feel free. Sometimes it’s good to tell someone. I’d love to hear what you’re planning to accomplish in 2024, on the page or off.
Once again, happy holidays and happy new year!
Twenty-Three New Books I Read and Loved in 2023:
Four 2024 Books I’ve Already Read and Loved:
Thanks so much for reading! If you’re not already subscribed, please consider doing so by clicking the button below. This post is also publicly accessible, so feel free to share!
Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable book) was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
I use a log too, but mine is simpler with just shaded circles and vertically arranged by month so that I can see the entire year on one page, a 12 x 31 grid, thus knowing how many days of the year I actually wrote. Almost every month I miss about a whole week, but when I start to lag, the gaps encourages me to return so the spaces in the year don’t get bigger.
My goal is to work on the third draft of my memoir. Although I am a bit stuck after revising the entire piece the past year. Going through the piece during the second drafting process was super enlightening. But now how to proceed is something I am thinking about.