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One of the profound ironies about writing a site about being a productive, efficient writer is that the better I am at what I write about, the less time I have to write about it. The last couple of months I’ve been getting more work than ever, even while I struggled to deal with a difficult semester (my day job is teaching anthropology and gender studies to college students) and an even more difficult break-up and move.

My guest writers helped a lot – Aaron Peters, Kelly Kilpatrick, and Stephanie Stiavetti stepped in to take some of the load off as I got moved and then buried under end-of-the-semester grading, and I’m immensely grateful to them all. It’s been fun having guest writers on the site, and I’m definitely up for more.

The Writer’s Technology Companion has changed quite a bit since I started it. When I launched the site last March, I thought I would be primarily reviewing software and writing how-tos. Those kind of posts have been common on the site, of course, but I find that the ones I enjoy writing the most are the ones about being a more productive writer, and so that will be a bigger focus in the year to come. These posts take quite a bit longer to write, especially since – as anyone who follows my work at Lifehack will have seen – I’m struggling mightily with the notion of “productivity” and how to integrate efficiency, meaning, and passion in our lives. But I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit, even if it means slightly longer gaps between posts here.

To help fill some of those gaps, I’m going to try to do regular posts bringing together some of the best posts around the Internet on writing. I come across tons of great stuff out there, and it’s time I start sharing with my readers. Now, as a general rule, I hate link posts, so my promise to you is that I’ll never post just a set of links; I’ll always make an effort to bring some kind of value to the material I’m linking to, so that even if you never click a link, you’ll walk away with something useful.

Since goals and resolutions are on everyone’s mind as we move into the new year, I thought I’d start by sharing with you some of the great posts I’ve come across on that theme.

Better Resolutions for Writers

No-Fail Freelance Resolutions: How To Succeed in 2009: Jenny Cromie offers some great advice for setting writing goals for the new year. Especially welcome is her emphasis on spending some time to know yourself as a writer – check your commitment level and learn what motivates you now, so you’re ready when the writing flags and just about anything else seems preferable to working towards your goals.

“He shoots…he scores!” (or, writing goals): Jane of Seven angels, four kids, one family offers a crucial piece of advice to writers setting goals for 2009: focus on things you actually have control over. You can write the greatest work ever and the most stunning queries of all time, but in the end you cannot control whether your book gets published. “Get book published” might be setting yourself up to fail; “Submit manuscript/proposal to one publisher or agent every month this year” is  something you can make sure happens.

Writing Goals and New Year’s Resolutions Tips for Writers: Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen offers her take on writers’ resolutions for the new year. with a special emphasis on financial goals. Writers often ignore finances (which makes us especially easy to take advantage of, unfortunately) – if you want to make writing your life’s work, though, you’ve got to take the money side seriously.

Stress Relief for Writers: Four Ways to Achieve Your Writing Goals: Angela Booth tells writers to relax – and provides some strategies for doing so. Though many writers seem to thrive on chaos and deadlines, the reality is that our minds think and work best when they’re at peace. Clear your mind and let the ideas flow!

47 Ways Copyblogger Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions: Although this is primarily a “sneeze post” for Copyblogger (a “sneeze post” is a post written primarily to direct you to other work in the site’s archive – it’s a good traffic generating tool, but typically not especially exciting content), Sonia Simone provides lots of good advice for writers in between the links to other Copyblogger posts. And, to be honest, you can do a lot worse for yourself than to spend some time with Copyblogger’s usually excellent writing posts.

Top 10 Resolutions for Writers: A simple, to-the-point overview of the ten resolutions that should top a writer’s list of resolutions.

Ten health hazards for writers: Writing seems like a pretty safe work option, compared to say driving the ice roads of the Arctic or doing humanitarian relief work in a warzone, but it’s not without its own particular on-the-job hazards. Tumblemoose Writing Productions offers tips for avoiding 10 health risks that can stop your writing in its tracks. Don’t fall short of your goals because you’re too sick or injured to write!

And don’t forget my own post, How to Set SMART Writing Goals, which isn’t about resolutions per se but which has plenty to say about setting goals that work.

Sonja finds the camaraderie of NaNoWriMo a powerful motivator for writing, and can be found on the NaNoWriMo forums as “streetmouse”. You can read her advice for NaNoWriMo participants on her blog, White Picket Fences. For more information about Sonja, check out her website.

Why do you do NaNoWriMo? What benefits have you gotten from your participation?

My first year doing NaNoWriMo, I just wanted to see if I could write a novel. At all… in a month or in however long it took. As it turned out, I managed to win my first year, and that gave me the confidence to try to become a novelist. Now I do NaNoWriMo to keep proving to myself that I can finish novels. I don’t think novels get easier to write, I think you just have to know you’ve done it before and can do it again. I’ve finished two novels because of NaNoWriMo and gotten a confidence boost every year, knowing I can bang out a lot of words really fast.

How did you keep yourself inspired and motivated during NaNoWriMo?

I participate a lot in the forums, and especially in the chat room. I love getting egged on and I love to egg on my friends. I do a lot of word wars and a lot of complaining about novel writing being HAAAARD. The social aspects keep me going. And, I won’t lie, the competition helps too.

What sort of planning, if any, are you doing this year before you start writing?

I’ve got an outline and (shh!) the first little bit of a story done this year, so I’m ahead of the game. I always do outlines before I start writing. I am definitely NOT a seat-of-the-pants writer.

What are some of the tools you use to keep yourself organized and on-track during NaNoWriMo? How do you use them?

I love love love NaNoWriMo’s new tracking tools that let you compulsively check your wordcount and percentage and targets and all that good statistical stuff. I actually keep my own spreadsheet on non-NaNo months so I can do the same thing. It’s the competition thing again: I want to be ahead of the curve! My outline also keeps me going, especially when I sit down to write a scene. If I have an outline, at least I have some vague idea of what to write.

How do you manage your time during NaNoWriMo to make time for writing?

I write in the spare moments I can get, like lunch. I used to write for an hour every day on the bus. Sadly, I drive to work now, so that’s a no-go. I’ve been known to sneak in a few sentences at work, but I find that cutting out evening TV time is the best method for me. I sit next to my husband on the couch, pop in my headphones, and tap away while he watches his favorite shows or surfs the web.

What advice do you have for other writers doing NaNoWriMo for the first time?

Participate! Play with all the toys, use all the stuff on the website, buy the t-shirt, OWN it! The more you invest, the more you’ll get out.

Why do you do NaNoWriMo? What benefits have you gotten from your participation?

It’s a great way to kick your writing into gear.  You don’t have any excuses during this.  You just write.  And really, isn’t that what being a writer is all about?  The forums are also a good way to meet other writers, and the in person write-ins are a blast as well.

How did you keep yourself inspired and motivated during NaNoWriMo?

It can be tough, but talking with people doing NaNo as well can definitely help.  Also, my drive to actually become a novelist propelled me along.

What sort of planning, if any, are you doing this year before you start writing?

I’m doing more planning this year than in any other.  I’m working on the plot and characters and I’ll have that all printed out and placed in a binder once November first rolls around.  I’m hoping that this will help keep my story on track so I have something salable at the end of the month.  I may even have an outline.  Then, all I’ll have to do is write.

What are some of the tools you use to keep yourself organized and on-track during NaNoWriMo? How do you use them?

The website has good counters to help you track your word count.  In the past, I even had an excel spreadsheet that tracked how many words I wrote each day and had nice graphs.  I’m not sure what I’m doing this year, but I really did like that spreadsheet.  I may go back to it.

How do you manage your time during NaNoWriMo to make time for writing?

I set daily word goals.  It doesn’t matter how long I take, I need to meet that goal.  And honestly, if you can’t even take a half hour out of your day to write, then maybe this isn’t for you.

What advice do you have for other writers doing NaNoWriMo for the first time?

Don’t worry about whether what you’re writing is good.  The whole point is to push through any blocks and just write.  Don’t go back and edit or fix paragraphs because it’ll just slow you down.  Instead, wait until you are completely done with the first draft before you start perfecting the story.

 

Image by churl via Flickr

It’s November and for thousands of writers, that means National Novel Writing Month (or “NaNoWriMo”) a grueling exercise in creativity and self-discipline with the goal of creating a 50,000 word novel manuscript in 30 days.

I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year – I don’t have any pressing desire to write a novel at the moment, and I’m a little overbalanced already juggling two full-time jobs (teaching and freelance writing) already. But though I won’t be working towards a completed manuscript, I’ll have something in common with those writers who are doing NaNoWriMo this year – like them, I’ll be writing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1700 words a day, pretty much every day in November. Unlike them, I’ll do the same thing in December, then in January, and on and on.

While I admire the single-mindedness of the NaNoWriMo participants, the dogged determination to produce a novel, the fact is that writers who write for a living are always in NaNoWriMo mode. I figure I write somewhere between 300,000 – 400,000 words a year for publication, plus countless work I produce that either doesn’t get published or gets circulated informally (on academic listservs, for instance). That works out to about 1200–1400 words a day, 250 days a year, not far off from the 1700 words a NaNoWriMo writer needs to average every day in November to hit the 50,000-word mark.

I don’t say this to brag – frankly, it isn’t brag-worthy. It’s just what a working writer has to do. There are plenty of writers who are more productive than I am – and plenty of writers with more on their plate than I have who manage to write as much. The point isn’t to brag, but to talk about how I, and so many others, manage to sustain a reasonably high level of productivity day in and day out, in the hopes that it will give some of the NaNoWriMo writers out there a little inspiration in their long slog towards 50,000 words.

Here, then, are 7 tips to help keep you focused on your writing goals. I’m assuming you’ve already set goals (SMART goals, even!) – if you’re taking the NaNoWriMo challenge, the goals are more or less set for you: 50,000 words by November 30, with accountability provided by NaNoWriMo’s word count tracking.

1. Make a commitment.

Whether you write year-round or just during NaNoWriMo, at least 90% of getting to “done” is having the right mind-set. Making a commitment doesn’t just mean sitting down and grinding the words out day after day, but feeling every day’s writing as an expression of who you are and the choices you have made. You have to be able to see yourself as a writer, and/or as a NaNoWriMo winner, not just in the future but in the now — the words you write today have to count as you write them, not in some imagined future if you reach your goals.

In fact, commitment has as much to do with failure as with success. Commitment means that you’ll be as happy to work your ass off for 30 days and not hit 50,000 words as if you do reach 50,000 words. Because if you really try, if you really put yourself out there and you still don’t make it, you’ll know there is room for you to grow as a writer – and you’ll have a good idea of where those opportunities lie.

2. Set a schedule.

Think about your life. There’s things that are important to you, things you have to do – classes, work, dates, your kids’ activities, business flights, doctor’s appointments. Then there are things that are less important, things you’ll try to fit in when you have a spare moment – reading a new novel, visiting the museum, sorting your family photos. The difference between these two types of activities is that the first ones, the profoundly important ones, the ones we need to be absolutely sure we don’t miss, have their own specific time set aside for them. The second group, the ones that are nice to get done but not crucial in any way, get done “whenever”.

Which group does your writing belong in?

Even if your time is relatively unstructured, make sure to schedule fixed times for writing every day. If your schedule is already complex, this is even more important – it’s far to easy to find yourself too drained after a hard day’s work to put n your writing time. Knowing that 7-9pm is writing time will help keep you from getting distracted. If you have the time and keep writing beyond your scheduled time, that’s fine – but make sure you block off enough time to do your minimum writing throughout the week.

3. Make a sacrifice.

Chances are, your time is already pretty much spoken for, so to fit in any serious writing, something’s going to have to give. Getting up an hour earlier might be in order. Remember that to stay healthy, you’ll need to get to sleep earlier too, so this is a serious lifestyle change (hence the sacrifice) – but many writers fid that the quiet time before their day gets under way is a more productive time than the last tired hour before they go to bed.

Another sacrifice to consider is giving up an hour or two of television each night. Given the state of TV these days, that might not be much of a sacrifice! Or you might give up part of your lunch hour, a weekly visit to the spa, or your morning newspaper ritual.

There’s something more to this than just making time, though. Making some kind of sacrifice reinforces the importance of your writing. What’s more, discovering that what you’ve given up pales in comparison to the writing you’ve accomplished puts you one step closer to embracing your identity as a writer.

4. Write an outline.

I know: BOR-iiiing! Shades of high school all over, right?

Get over it.

While there are a handful of prolific writers who don’t outline (not formally, anyway – many still map out their writing in their heads), the more pressure you’re under to write lots, the more some kind of planning will help.

Outlining exists at two levels. The first is project outlining, laying out the course of your project from start to finish – usually chapter-by-chapter (for works long enough to have chapters, anyway) with subheads and main points for each chapter. The second is session outlining, putting down what you plan to write about in each session of writing. As a general rule, any time you sit down to write, it’s a good idea to lay out a few basic points, milestones you intend to hit in your days writing. Likewise, if you’re brainstorming – or an idea just comes to you out of the blue – write down a couple of main points when you write down each idea.

5. Capture everything.

When you’re writing all the time, you need ideas – all the time. Ideally, when you sit down to write, you’ll just need to record and structure the ideas that you’ve already worked through over the course of the day. The lass time you spend thinking of what to write, the more time you can spend during your allotted writing time just writing.

That’s why capturing ideas when they occur, wherever they occur, is so important. Carry a notebook, and use it. Adopt a ubiquitous capture strategy and live by it. Do as much of that work as possible before you start your writing session, the better – and the less likely you are to spend your precious writing time trying desperately to think of something to write.

6. Park downhill.

Always leave off writing when you have at least one more thing to say. Writing is weird – most of the time, it takes a ton of effort to get started, but once we’re writing, the words just come. Minimize the effort you need to reach “escape velocity” by setting yourself up to have something to say the moment you sit down. By the time you finish writing what you sat down already prepared to write, you’ll have built up the momentum to carry you into the next thought.

7. Condition yourself to write.

If at all possible, set aside a place for writing, ideally only for writing. Every time you sit down in that place, write something. Before long, your mind will come to associate the place itself with the act of writing, so that sitting down will trigger the urge to write.

Some writers create little rituals they perform before or as they write. Again, if you have a set of steps you go through before you write, going through those steps can help trigger your mind to write. The idea is to create self-reinforcing associations – connections between certain places, times, or acts that help shift you into the writing mindset.

For more tips on hitting your writing goals every day, be sure to read the interviews I’ll be posting throughout the month with writers who have done NaNoWriMo before – not all of them have “won”, but all of them have developed their own strategies for getting to “done” in their writing. And please let us know your techniques in the comments!

Our first volunteer is Catherine Hicks, a graphic artist and web developer. Catherine has participated in NaNoWriMo three times so far, and “won” – that is, completed 50,000 words – all three times. She has self-published two of her NaNoWriMo novels, and the third book, a non-fiction work, is currently on its way to becoming a school textbook. Catherine lives in the Bay Area with three “babies of the furry kind” (I can only assume she means werewolf babies) and is pursuing an Art Therapy certificate in graduate school. Find out more about here at her website.

Why do you do NaNoWriMo? What benefits have you gotten from your participation?

It allows me to have a goal and focus on my writing in a way I never have the time for during the 11 months out of the year. It gives me a great sense of community with other writers and a great feeling of accomplishment when the month is over.

How did you keep yourself inspired and motivated during NaNoWriMo?

I am fortunate to live in an area where there are many people working on novels for NaNoWriMo so we often meet in coffee shops and other places during the month. I also have networked with other people online for when I am not home, which seems to be often during NaNoWriMo due to my job.

What sort of planning, if any, are you doing this year before you start writing?

I have never gone into NaNoWriMo without a complete outline of whatever it is I am going to work on. You can’t get to somewhere new if you don’t have a roadmap, and before starting the story I definitely sit down and roadmap everything. I do character analysis charts and have a good feel for my characters and plot before I start.

What are some of the tools you use to keep yourself organized and on-track during NaNoWriMo? How do you use them?

I have a spreadsheet that I found online that tracks words written and how far along you are towards your goal. I also always buy a special notebook just for NaNoWriMo that I keep with me if inspiration on the story comes along and I’m not near my computer. I have also in the past carried around a tape recorder to get those ideas down in a format I can translate to computer later.

I also create a folder on my computer desktop. Since I’ve already outlined the story, I know how many chapters the entire thing is going to be, so I create blank pages for each chapter in the story so I can just open the file and go.

How do you manage your time during NaNoWriMo to make time for writing?

We have a group of people that meet in the coffee shop. I keep the journal I spoke about above by my bedside when I am at home as inspiration always seems to strike me as I am going to bed. Since I always write and journal before bed, that is normally the time I am able to make the most progress in writing my story.

What advice do you have for other writers doing NaNoWriMo for the first time?

Don’t freak out if you don’t finish. You will still more than likely have a great starting point for a novel. Just because the month ends and you didn’t reach the goal, keep writing and you’ll have something to be proud of. Not everyone can say that they’ve written a novel — and whether you get it done in one month or one year, its still a great accomplishment.

It also seems for some like a daunting task to write that much — I know seemed that for me the first time I did it. That is why I outline before the month begins. That way, I can look at each chapter as its own individual story. I know where it is going and I know where I want to end up, so breaking it down like that makes it feel less intimidating.

Stikk has come up with a way to make sure there are consequences if you fail. Stikk is an online service that allows you to set up a “contract” with yourself, and back it up with money. You deposit $10, $20, $100, or whatever amount is worth working for, and if you achieve your goal, you get it back. If not, the money is donated to one of several charities Stikk has established partnerships with.

If putting your own money on the line isn’t enough to keep you motivated, Stikk has another card up their sleeve: the anti-charity. Select this option, and not only will you lose your money if you fail to reach your goal, but Stikk will donate it to a charity you hate. If you’re pro-life, it will go to a pro-choice charity; pro-choice writers can choose a pro-life one.

Stikk allows you to self-report whether you’ve failed or succeeded, working on the honor system. If you don’t quite trust yourself to be honest, you can designate a third-party “referee” to verify your success or failure. Pick someone you trust to be fair — if they say you’ve failed, you’ve failed, as far as Stikk is concerned.

You can set Stikk up to track a single big goal, but you can also set incremental goals — like, “write 5,000 words a week). I wouldn’t set goals that are more granular than that, since you do need to log in and report success or failure for each goal — or your referee does, if you choose to have one. Try to find a “sweet spot” that’s frequent enough to keep you working steadily but not so frequent that keeping your Stikk account up-to-date eats into your writing time.

If you don’t set goals, you won’t achieve them.

There are a lot of reasons people don’t set clear goals. Most of them boil down to a fear of commitment – and of letting ourselves down when we fail to live up to that commitment. Saying “I’m going to finish my novel” sets us up for failure. What if I don’t have any ideas? What if some life crisis happens and I can’t finish? What if, like the main character in Wonder Boys, I have too many ideas, and it just keeps growing and growing and growing…? What if something better comes along?

And on and on. We have a million ways of talking ourselves out of committing to achievement. So we avoid the commitment. We keep our options open. We dally.

As anyone who’s ever been in a romantic relationship without commitment knows, this is a recipe for disaster. In fact, it’s a pretty good analogy, because an author’s relationship with a work in progress is a lot like your relationship with your significant other. You have to work at it every day, and nurture it, and accept its quirks and even failures. And if you lack real commitment, sooner or later, one or the other of you will flake out.

SMART goals are easier to achieve than dumb ones

One reason goal-setting is so daunting is because we don’t know how to set good goals. We set vague, unspecified, open-ended goals – goals with precisely the same faults we mercilessly strike from our writing. “Someday”, “eventually”, “when inspiration strikes”, “as the Muses allow” – these words and phrases need to be banished from your goal-setting vocabulary. What you need are crisp, clear, specific goals.

SMART goals.

The idea of the SMART goal was conceived by a business psychologist named George Doran. SMART is an acronym, standing for goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant, and
• Time-bound.

Let’s look at these elements one by one.

A bad goal – but the kind we are most comfortable committing to – is something like “Write more.”

That’s a dumb goal – more than what? How will you know if you’re writing more? How much more? When should you write more – tomorrow? next week? someday?

A SMART goal would be “Write 1,000 words a day every weekday between now and September 15th.” You know when to start — “now” – and you can easily track your progress – just write down daily word counts. If they’re less than a thousand, don’t stop writing that day!

Here’s another dumb goal: get novel published. It’s too big, too unspecific – it doesn’t suggest any action. Every day, you’ll say to yourself, “Oh, right. I really oughtta get that novel published!” and then go back to surfing the Internet, watching TV, or playing Wii.

Instead, set a series of SMART goals:

• Write a proposal for my novel by July 30th.
• Identify 10 likely agents for my novel by August 7th.
• Send copies of proposal to 10 agents by August 15th.

Even that might not be granular enough – maybe you’re not prepared to write the proposal (it’s not achievable). Maybe you need to:

• Research how to write a book proposal by July 20th.
• Brainstorm 20 promotional ideas for book by July 22nd.
• Identify 20 magazines that would be likely to review my novel by July 25th.

Of course, I’ve taken for granted that publishing your novel is relevant to you, and if you’re a writer, it probably is. But you have to think about whether a goal is relevant, and how, every time, or you won’t have the necessary motivation to complete the goal. It’s boring researching competitor’s books for a book proposal – but if you want to publish that novel, then doing the legwork becomes incredibly relevant.

Make sure you have some way of keeping track of your goals. For daily writing goals and the like, I like the idea of keeping a white board by your desk and writing daily word counts after every writing session. But a notebook, diary, computer file, or anything else will work fine. Maybe you can start a “goal diary” – a nice-looking notebook that you can write goals in, one per page, and track progress in as needed.

Whatever you decide to use, make sure you keep on top of it. Accountability, even just to yourself, is key – both so you can feel good about your project (especially in the middle of a big project that seems like it will never end) and so you can identify hangups and other problems that are keeping you from accomplishing your goals.