Achieving Your Writing Goals

As writers we all have goals that we want to achieve - write and publish a novel, or a collection of poems/lyrics, or a collection of short stories, etc; write x amount of works... These are great goals to have but they need a deadline. Why?

Deadlines help you realize your goals and motivate you to spend more time working on your writing - be it an individual item or a collection of items or a novel or book... Without deadlines you will just slack off and won't focus on the writing that you want to bring to life... And it may take you years to complete your writing project, when in actuality it should take much less than that.

When setting deadlines for yourself be reasonable. If you are planning to write a novel don't say to yourself "I must finish this novel in two months" because chances are you won't be able to finish a whole novel (even without editing) in such a short time. And when your two month deadline will approach and you realize you won't finish it by then you will get discouraged and upset and may even stop working on the novel altogether. That of course is not such a great thing, especially if you plan to publish it.

If you are writing a lyric or a poem don't give yourself months or even weeks to complete it. If you do that you will slack off because you will say to yourself "I have a lot of time to write this thing... no need to do it now..." By putting it off you will forget all about it and when the deadline is up you will have nothing written, which is a disadvantage to you as a writer.

Now of course the deadline is not set in stone. You can always complete your writing project after the deadline but this will prevent you from writing more pieces since you will be focused on writing the one you never wrote.

I have been a member of Hub Pages since 2009 and I have never set writing goals or deadlines for myself. That is I never told myself that I must write a certain number of hubs by a certain date. Because I didn't do that I don't have as many hubs written as I would like to have. This leaves me unsatisfied with myself and so I have decided it's time to set writing goals and deadlines for myself.

My goal is to have 300 hubs published in the near future. I would like to do it possibly by summer 2015. If I write a hub a day I can surely achieve that and even before summer rolls around. The key is to actually make myself sit down and write every day, or at least every other day. To do that I need to come up with a list of things I want to write about, so that is what I am going to do. I won't necessarily come up with 194 possible hub ideas in one sitting but I should be able to start with a bunch and then slowly progress from there and expand my list.

I have seen hubbers who have been on the site for a much shorter time period than me publish way more hubs than me and that is what is motivating me to do this. Of course it is not about quantity but about quality. Still, the more hubs I write the more proud of myself I will be. And I will also give myself a higher chance of making more money too, which is also one of my goals.

Another thing that can help you achieve your writing goals, which I've mentioned in the paragraph above, are other writers you either know or whose works you've read. For example, let's say you write hubs and you know that your fellow hubber has written and published more hubs than you. This can motivate you in a big way. You will want to surpass your fellow hubber and will allocate more time for writing hubs. Not only will it increase the items (hubs in this case) in your writing portfolio (profile in this case) but it will also leave you with a sense of accomplishment, pride, and satisfaction, which is a must for a writer to have in order to grow.

When setting goals for yourself you have to be specific. Don't just say to yourself "I want to write and publish a book". Figure out what kind of book you want to write and what topic you want to write about. And then set a deadline for yourself that is within reason of course. If you are not specific in terms of what book you want to write and publish and what it should be about chances are you will never write that book. Same goes for an individual piece of writing.

I hope you have found these tips useful in achieving your writing goals. Feel free to share tips of your own if you have any. Thanks.