Angela Booth's Writing Blog

Achieving your writing goals in 2007 -- aim for success

Here we are in February and the first month of 2007 has already gone.

It's time to review the goals you set in late December and work out whether you still want to achieve them. If you've decided that these goals are no longer appropriate for you in 2007, scrap them and decide on some new writing goals for this year.

Decide that you will work on your writing goals every day. This is easy when your goals excite you.

If your goals aren't exciting enough for you to leap out of bed in the morning and start writing immediately, you need to change them. It's vital that you're excited about the goals you set, and one can tell you what is exciting to you except you.

The way to writing success in 2007 is completely open to you, but you have to take the first step, and the next step and the next.

Set exciting goals and start stepping. :-)

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Make 2007 your best year ever: work on your goals now

How's your goal-achievement record?

You can get much better at achieving ANY goal when you write about that goal. This is because once once your goal is written down on paper (paper is better for this process than a computer, go figure), all your niggling doubts about the goal will float to the surface, like ice cubes in a glass of mineral water.

Deal with your doubts: write them down

Here's the thing about doubts: they can only hurt you when they're unconscious. Let's say you want to write a book in 2007. Great goal. You're excited. You imagine yourself as a published author.

Write down both the goal, and the doubts - I won't have the time , I can't write an entire book, what if my mother/ significant other hates it, etc.

The doubts, written down, will make you uncomfortable. The next day, they'll seem so stupid that they will make you laugh. It's true - try it. There's something about writing things down that shrinks them. Monsters look like cute garden gnomes.

Notice that you don't have to DO anything about your doubts, except write them down. Once they're written, they melt and disappear, just like the ice cubes.

Therapeutic writing: writing for personal development

Most first-novels are therapeutic for the novelist, who manages to get a whole lot of stuff off his chest and out of the depths of his subconscious and frees himself to WRITE. Unfortunately, this also means that most first novels are unsalable, but the writing can have major benefits for the writer in personal development.

Since I've found writing very therapeutic, and believe that when you consciously use writing as a personal development process it improves your writing skills, I'm starting a new "writing as personal development" category.

Are you using writing as a personal development tool? How? Please leave a comment.