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2026 Writing Goal

By the end of 2026, I will write 450,000 words. This goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

Yes, that looks like a lot. And it is. And I have already achieved that many words or more four years in a row.(So I know it is achievable and realistic!)

What this looks like when you break it down:

450,000 words a year is:

37,500 words per month

8,654 words per week

1,237 words per day (So close to being 1234! lol)

Does that mean I write 1200+ words everyday? It doesn’t. But I know myself. There’s always one or two months of the year where I will get closer to 3,000 words a day (hello November!), and some months where I am editing where I will struggle to reach 800. Still, I balance out the months where I aim for 25,000 words with ones where I go for 50,000 or 75,000 words. It all depends on where I am in my writing process.

Where Am I Now?

As of yesterday, June 26, 2026, I have written 212,732 words. I am 47.3% of the way through my goal. I am running a bit behind my goal, but I’m on a catching up streak.

What Do I Count?

There are so many ways people count their words and the need for confirmation about what counts and what doesn’t baffles me. I learned early on in re-starting my life as a writer that word count goals were very motivating to me. I started ahead on my first ever novel writing month and I stayed ahead the whole month (100,000 words!). I also had a manuscript that had been stuck in my head for more than twenty years that demanded release. (Read more about that here.) When I started editing that manuscript and tried to track minutes or pages, it wasn’t the same motivation. I now edit by striking through unwanted words, count all my new words, and then clean up my docs. That’s how motivating word count goals are for me. I will deal with the mess.

Once I learned what works for me, I set up my own system to keep my motivation. I count all the words that go into my draft. I count all the words I write planning the story. I count the words in the outline, I count the words I put into the spreadsheet where I note how each character agrees or conflicts with another character. I also decided, that since some of my editing days require much more minute changes than sweeping rewrites, that I will count every fifteen minutes of line editing as 250 words. (First, I can write 250 words in fifteen minutes easily. Second, I edit through more than 250 manuscript words in line edits in 15 minutes. So, I feel like I’m shortchanging myself.)

The point, dear reader, is that there are no word counting police. I do what motivates me and I encourage you to do what motivates you.

Word counts might not even be your thing, but maybe you want to do some writing every day (or five days a week, or every weekend). If a streak works better for you, set yourself up with a streak. The goal is, and the reason smart goals exist to help you, is for you to set goals you can accomplish.

Looking Back

So, I’m behind so far this year. I’ve almost caught up, but I’m not quite there yet. And even though I’m not worried about it now (easy for me to say now lol) it wasn’t true at the beginning of the year. See on my TrackBear diagram where the line starts going flat in February? Yeah, I had a life change that left me more exhausted than I have ever known. And you can see when things returned to my version of normal. So as the months ticked through February and March and April and I was doing my best to continue writing and I was moving that line farther and farther away, you can bet I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to make it up.

And even before that, in January, when I was working on a new writing process that wasn’t fast drafting and didn’t result in a complete book in 3-6 weeks, I was worried I had messed up choosing to keep my goal from the year before.

But I made a decision in April to abandon a romantic fantasy project to revamp my epic fantasy project. And getting back into the story that hung around in my brain for more than twenty years is probably the decision that saved this writing goal.

I’m going to catch up. I’ll fumble a bit here and there. But I’ll catch up, and I’ll end the year ahead of my goal.

How are you doing at meeting your goals this year?

Until it did.

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And, as seems to be my way, it didn’t strike a chord the way you might expect.

To me, “write what you know” didn’t mean writing a memoir of my experiences (I could probably make a good memoir or two, I’ve got some good material.) Nor was it writing a character that was essentially me going through a specific event.

Nope. We’ll take it to the third level of abstraction.

I infused an idea of a challenge I faced into the growth arc of a character. So, not autobiographical, or memoir, not plot, but internal growth arc.

I was growing and changing, and I had my character grow and change, too.

Of course, my growth arc wasn’t nearly as life-changing as my character’s. But there was a solidification of what I was learning about myself and to an extent, a deepening of what I was learning about myself as I wrote my characters’ struggles.

In essence, a bit of self-discovery and a dose of catharsis.

What it allowed me to do for my writing was take a step into my body and put the physical sensations of what I was going through on the page. And to take a step into my mind and draw out the stages of thought and how I felt.

What it allowed me to do for myself was to feel the realization with the character as they figured out how to grow. In Story Genius, Lisa Cron spends a whole chapter describing why our brains need story, that it’s a matter of survival. That what we learn as we follow a character’s internal journey helps us navigate the world around us.

In this case, I wasn’t reading it, I was writing it, and the beauty was that I got to see how diving deeper into my character learning to use her voice was giving me more confidence and strength to do so in my own life.

Because I’ll be real with you. I love the written word. And I love it because I have time to process it. I can re-read writing and I can edit writing. I don’t have just one instant to say the right thing that needs to be said or to make a good impression or to ask a vital question. In conversation, I’m focused on understanding the perspective of the person I’m talking to. I struggle in the moment to weigh what is being said with my own values, feelings, and needs. And if conversation does clash against a hard line (of which there are likely fewer for me than there are for others) I sometimes won’t realize it until the conversation is well over.

And there was one time a hard line was hit and I acted on it and I had a whole nervous system reaction. I was in an IEP meeting for my son, who has physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy and he’s going to have these needs for the rest of his life. The occupational therapist was new and was feeling the constraints of her position and struggled to think (well, within the box, I guess), about what goals my son would have for another year. She wanted to move his status from actively receiving therapy to consultation. As a teacher and a parent, I knew what this meant and I knew it was a hard no for me and I knew I couldn’t sit there and say nothing.

When I spoke up, my vision darkened, my heart pounded in my chest, my hands gripped the arm of the chair. Action was needed at that very moment and the adrenaline spike threatened to take me out.

But I persevered, and we did not move my son to consult status and me coming up with a goal for him on the spur of the moment was not perfect, but it accomplished the task.

And it was that experience, that knowledge that I infused into my writing. I had that moment to draw from. That experience to deepen how I described what my character was going through on the page as she learned to use her voice.

So “write what you know” doesn’t have to be writing about your whole life. It doesn’t have to be writing about one specific event. It can be about a difficult experience and how you pushed through it and what you learned along the way.

And that’s one way you can apply “write what you know.”

It can be hard not to consider what to work on as a writer when there are some trends flying through the sky like rockets. But when you finally settle on a project to tackle, go ahead and ask yourself a couple of questions first. Why do I want to write this? What do I want to say? What was the spark that inspired me?

I never paid attention to the themes in my novel, and was pleasantly surprised when others found themes that I hadn’t thought of! But themes can be important to framing your characters’ experiences. And, if you know what you want to say going into a novel, you can write a tighter novel. And we all like tighter novels.

In addition, especially if you have a story to tell, if you’ve learned something to share, if you have a passion for cultured butter and need to get your thoughts out into the world, or a deep desire to show perseverance through hardship. Your novels will be richer for it if you just lean into your passions instead of focusing on what everyone wants you to write.

So, do a little of the work in advance. Ask yourself what you want to say, and go boldly toward saying it!

What are you working on and what are you trying to say?

My last writing journey post detailed the familiar external plot (not 2 plots, like the title suggests😯). You know, the expected structure of many books you read. But there’s a second plot, the internal plot. And yet, as a critique partner and beta reader, many manuscripts I’ve read fall short on how the main character needs to be transformed by the external plot.

And if you’re a querying writer, I guarantee you agents can spot a non-existent internal plot from your blurb, and in this age of character-driven stories, that might be where the spark is missing.

It’s also something I needed to learn, and what I focused on for the third draft of Under the Bright Sun—my middle grade novel in a dystopian fantasy setting about a girl that finds her voice and fights for change both for herself and her village.

So! What is the internal plot and how do you develop it?

The internal plot is your character’s arc throughout the story. It’s why the character does what they do and the choices they make. It’s how they react to the external plot which is always there forcing change. And, hopefully, they change to become a better person. (If your character is a hero.)

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Developing Internal Plot

A story begins with a character, in a setting, with a problem. Let’s take a closer look at that problem. This will help you start your character’s internal arc.

Desire and Fear

Your character wants something. They have a deep desire they want to achieve in their life. But they don’t have it yet. And they don’t have it because a deep fear is standing in their way. This leaves the character in a zone of stasis. This is where they start in the story before the plot wagon comes along to whisk them away. And these are important to put on the page as early as you can.

It’s the push and pull of desire and fear that makes your character relatable.

We all have something we desire and we have fears about the process, sometimes ones we don’t really know are there. My writing came to an abrupt halt and was non-existent for years because I was afraid of what I needed to do to make it better and to put it out into the world. I’m older now (and arguably wiser) with a stroke of determination that propels me forward. (Yeah, we’ll say forward, because I haven’t achieved my dreams of having a published novel yet, and that hill keeps getting steeper, but I’m still here seeking out and trying new tools to help me reach the top.) Do I still have fears? Yes! And your characters will shift goals and change their fears and desires as the external plot forces them to. But, readers need a clear picture of what desires the character has and what fears they have about this goal before we see their world torn asunder.

Goals, Motivation, and Conflict (GMC)

Even if everything shifts after the inciting incident, it’s important to establish your character’s goals, motivation, and conflict as early as possible in your novel. Why? Because these three things help establish your character’s problem and why it’s important to them.

While you need to know the desire and fear and you might trickle them onto the early pages, you need to make the goals, motivation, and conflict explicit for your reader as soon as possible.

Your character’s desire ties into their goals. What do they want? Why do they want it? What do they think achieving these goals will say about them?

There’s going to be conflict with getting these goals, perhaps something internal like guilt, or external like competition. Who or what is standing in the way of their goals? What will they think they have to do to be successful?

And then there’s the motivation. What is driving that character toward their goals? Why do they want what they want? And how do their fears influence the choices they make toward those goals? What will it mean to them if they succeed? What will happen if they fail?

Remember, all of this is Act 1 stasis mode. Before you have your inciting incident, laying these out will establish what kind of person your character is for your readers so they know who they are taking this journey with. After your inciting incident, the GMC might change, shifting to align with new situations.

If you’ve queried before and you recognize some of these questions, that’s because they look a lot like the questions you answer in your query blurb. A good blurb goes with good first pages and knowing what drives your character and what they expect to face are part of writing good first pages.

Expectations

Here’s a little trick that will easily level up your character-driven story. What do they expect to happen? How does it compare to their life and what they know? How can you establish a sense of safety and then tear it away by having the unexpected happen?

Showing readers that your character expects a certain solution to their problem establishes what your character thinks and feels, helping readers relate to your character. It also helps readers keep track of what’s happening in the story, to check in on the character’s progress. This is a tip you can employ at the scene-level to keep readers following your characters through all the pages.

From Development to Arc

Now that you’ve established your character’s baseline desires and fears, goals, motivations, expectations, and conflicts, the next step is to stop at each of the major plot beats and consider how your character will react to what they experience. And at some point (right at about the 75% mark, or the All is Lost beat of Save the Cat), what the character fears most, or something else they didn’t realize they feared even more will stop them in their tracks and force them to take a look at those fears and desires, those wants and motivations, and force them to change. The external plot and internal plot go hand in hand to make your character to take a deep look at those fears and realize what they want is closer than they ever thought possible before. Somewhere along the way, the transformation to reaching it (or, let’s face it, letting it go) became a lot easier now that they’ve faced what they feared most. So, follow along with your external structure and make give them some opportunities to reflect.

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These tips were curated from my experience participating in the annual RevPit competition (2023-2026) and from the craft book Story Genius.

After working out an internal plot or character arc for my main character, I found my next step was figuring out how to add more interiority. Stay tuned for my next writing adventure!

Share The Determined Graphophile

What I love about art is the exploration. The adventure. And I, being self-taught, get to decide the path that journey takes. I can explore what interests me, question how it’s going, and when things don’t turn out the way I wish, hunt for a way to make it work better.

I didn’t become good at art overnight. I never had anything I created that made anyone say I was talented. Until I tried to draw an eye, and was downright determined to figure out the art. And after that, after I had some tools in hand and an understanding of the process, that’s when all of a sudden people were telling me I was ‘talented.’ Y’all, I’m over 40. I wasn’t born with this. And you can get ‘talented’ at things too.

I tried to draw a realistic eye. I wanted to capture the variety of colors and textures you see in an eye, how there’s an infinite world to discover behind the curtain of lashes.

When the result didn’t match the reference photo (it totally doesn’t, so you know I’m not bs-ing you when I say this is a new achievement for me), I watched videos that talked me through tips and techniques to better capture an eye realistically. I also recognized a few things about the practice. Today’s post is all about what I noticed along the way. To improve at art, I needed three things:

Patience, attention to detail, and grace.

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Patience

Patience with yourself and your work is essential in many fields. Whenever we take on something new, it takes time to figure out how to “get it right.” Our society projects a perception of “Fast perfection.” There is an expectation that you have to do something right the first time, and that if you can’t you’re not talented and shouldn’t even try. These are lies. If you encounter this kind of self-talk, tell it to stuff it.

Learning is ALL ABOUT practice and making mistakes. No one gets anything right the first time, though we throw the word ‘Talented’ around whenever we see someone doing something we aren’t good at. Babies fall bunches when learning to walk, yet most of us are now super practiced at the art of walking. We don’t even think about it. No one calls anyone else talented because they learned how to balance and coordinate their bodies to put one foot in front of the other.

Learning a new skill isn’t about talent. It’s about mindset and patience. It’s about looking at the mistakes you make when you’re learning and getting curious. In the case of my art, when I started my awesome eye study, I drew a not-so-realistic eye. I examined that eye.

Here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t tell myself, “Well, that doesn’t look realistic. I’m terrible at this. I’ll never be good at art.”

Nope!

I’ve learned quite a bit about Growth Mindset in my years as a teacher. Having a Growth Mindset means that you believe you can get better. For starters, add one word to your vocabulary, “yet.” So to back up. The mental talk I didn’t have might go more like this, “Well, that doesn’t look realistic, yet. I’m not good at this yet.” One simple change helps set you on a path toward improving.

So what did I tell myself?

I’m a teacher with a science background. I asked a question :D

Well, that doesn’t look as realistic as I want it to. What do I need to do to make it more realistic?

Nothing in there about giving up. I’m grateful I was raised with an expectation that I could do anything I put my mind to, within reason. No one squashed my dreams, no one told me that I’m not good enough (at least the important people in my life didn’t), no one told me I should just quit. If anyone talks to you like that, don’t believe them.

I turned to YouTube. I found an amazing artist that shared tips and tricks on how to make colored pencil drawings more realistic. I watched her video. I followed along with her tutorial. And even though I was using a different reference photo than the one she used in her video, I applied the principles and techniques to my own sketchbook. (Okay, I also bought a few extra materials, because tools make a big difference, too.)

Attention to Detail

One of the things I failed to do when I made my first attempt at the realistic eye, was to pay attention to the places that were really light in color. I mixed different colors, sure, but I didn’t leave space for the lighter values. So, when I finished my first eye drawing, it didn’t have the lighter spaces that gave the eye variety and contrast. When I started my little quarter sketch of an eye, I left spaces for the lighter parts of the eye. I used a lot of white and very light strokes of color to give them detail. I slowed myself down. I took my time.

It reminded me of learning to crochet with my grandmother when I was ten. I would learn the stitches and practice the stitches, but crochet is also about tension, too. And then there’s the skill of finding your first and last stitches when you finish a row. My grandmother had a very critical eye, and she would make me rip out my work if I had made a mistake. And then I would have to start all over again.

I cherished those lessons for so many reasons, but it wasn’t until I after I was a teacher and after I learned about growth mindset and after I started learning new skills of my own, that I actually had the thought that those days of trying again and again and again laid a foundation for me to accept learning by practice.

Slowing down and paying attention to the details is what helped me create a better drawing. After my quarter eye attempt, I felt ready to take on an entire eye.

Grace

Grace to me, in this scenario, means I accepted that the process of making something look realistic takes time and mistakes. Learning something new takes time. I’m not going to get it in one try or overnight or accomplish things on a timetable I set. The eye drawing that had me astonished at what I could do? That took somewhere close to ten hours to complete. And I guarantee you that I erased a bunch along the way. I had to work slowly and methodically, I had to keep looking back and forth between my work and my reference photo, and my tutorial. I couldn’t rush myself or I would get something that didn’t look right. I just had to breathe in, breathe out, and give myself the grace to take my time to learn.

Turns out I needed to apply this advice in my writing journey, too. 😂

Stay tuned for more adventures!

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Before I get into how helpful this book was to me and my writing journey, I need to share an aspect of my perspective. And to clue you in, I’m very comfortable learning and existing in a procedural way. But also, my brain loves loves loves to find and create connections. I’m the person that will play 6 degrees of separation with ✨ideas.✨

So, here’s my take on plot.

They’re all the same.

And perhaps, as I build up my blog, I’ll post on how individual plots match other individual plots (say, Romancing the Beat vs. the Hero’s Journey). No promises though! I let creativity take me where it will. For now I’ll start with the basics, which is, inherently, why they are all essentially One Plot.

One Plot to Rule them All

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Which means every story has a three-act plot. (Yes, even four-act plots, but that’s also another post.)

It’s like the video of comedian Rob Paravonian when he sings his “Pachelbel’s Rant.”

Just like many pop songs of today have the same four chords of a song from the 1700s, many of our stories have the same structure.

And that, essentially, is where Save the Cat! comes from. From a screenwriter who noted that stories have similar elements. And these revolve around the beginning, the middle, and the end.

We can identify these parts. We’ve all seen the plot diagrams from school:

The Two Main Plot Points

All of these plot structures work, and all are inherently the same plot, because they all center on two focal points for the story. The inciting incident and the climax. The two places in the book where the main plot shoves the character into a journey and where the character resolves this main plot. What comes before the main plot is introduced is the exposition in the beginning. What comes after is the falling action and resolution toward the end, and everything in the middle is how the character keeps interacting with smaller pieces of this main plot to find a way to resolve it.

Don’t get me wrong, a story can exist in any form, and a story that has a beginning, middle, and end accomplishes much. And my writing definitely had beginnings, middles, and ends up to this point. But I still felt that something was missing. They weren’t polished. And at this point in my writing journey, I didn’t know what they needed to be polished. And it was that frustration that led me to dive deeper and learn more about the craft of writing. It was also that frustration that had me hold back the desire to send my book out to agents and query it. I knew it wasn’t ready yet, and I didn’t want to send out anything but my best work. So, I took the time to find out what my best work might look like when meshed with the kind of story agents and editors are looking to publish.

I dove into a new part of my writing journey: learning about craft. And the first book I turned to was Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel.

Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel

The meat of this book is organized by describing where to start with your hero, describing the individual plot beats, and then by offering full novel beat sheets in each of the ten genres (differently defined than conventional genres). There are thirteen beats a story should hit along its course, and Brody goes in depth into what should happen in each one with examples from various YA novels. What I loved most about this book and what really worked for me were the examples. I struggle to see how to put technique into action without a plethora of examples to draw from and Save the Cat delivers.

How Save the Cat! Helped my Writing

I found this book to be what I needed to take the next step in my writing journey. The first chapter goes into the main character (or hero). This book is a soft intro to the internal plot arc of the main character. The main character needs to come with a problem, a want, and a need. And my favorite quote from the book explains how the internal plot and external plots are linked:

“Storytelling is essentially just a series of choreographed steps: external events, which trigger internal realizations, which inspire proactive decisions. With each external event and internal realization it triggers, we get closer to the ultimate internal realization and the ultimate transformation” (Brody, 49).

This quote was the first key to me unlocking a better novel. Taking the baggage the character has at the beginning of the story, the external plot is a force that drives them toward the change they need to undergo to be a more whole and complete person. And the beats where this character most encounters this change is the debate, somewhere just after the midpoint, the dark night of the soul, and the dig deep down. These are the main points where a character needs to have their inner thoughts and desires clearly expressed on the page. And yes, judging from some initial feedback on my early writing, this was something I needed to add to my story.

Save the Cat took the plot diagram I’d learned in school, and added a whole bunch of meat to it. I decided to shelve my fantasy trilogy. It had more plot problems than I was ready to dissect, especially being a multi-POV work. Instead, I turned to one of my most recent manuscripts: a middle grade novel with a single POV. A story I drafted in 11 days and completed at 38,000 words. I used the beat sheet to re-plot this story, focusing on the problem, the want, and the need of my 12-year-old character. I set up my Scrivener file in the manner of the beats, giving myself extra text files for the multi-scene beats. I rewrote my story from beginning to end. The result? I had the most coherent plot I’d created yet. But I wasn’t ready to query this story. Not yet. It still needed something more.

Brody, Jessica, Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel. New York, Ten Speed Press. July, 18, 2023.

Ever since my first Nano, I’ve had a word count goal every month. And since seeing my progress above par was really motivating to me, I made sure to set goals that continued that success. The end result? I have a daily writing habit that nets a few pages of words each day and goals that I accomplish month to month.

I’ve taught goal setting to my middle school advisory classes and we set goals by using the SMART goal acronym. (See my last post here.) In addition to goal setting, I made sure I had time in my day to accomplish my goals, and that’s what this post is about. Now that you have a SMART goal, here is the step-by-step process you take to accomplish it.

Vision

First, decide what you want to change. What’s your vision for success?

If I want to write a novel in a month, I need to take the time to sit down and write. If I want to keep my house clean, I need to buckle down and pick up the broom. Something has to happen for me to accomplish my goals. What is that thing?

The SMART goal you crafted is a part of your vision, you should have a very specific idea of what you want to accomplish and about how often you’ll make an effort to do so.

Action

Second, carve out a time. When will you take action on your goal?

Goals won’t accomplish themselves. Finding a time to make sure they happen is key to making progress on it. If you’re stuck in some other routine, task reminders on your phone work really well to change your habits. Keep in mind that it takes three weeks for a new habit to develop, so give yourself grace if you miss a day or two. If you’re still struggling to commit to the time you set, stop and evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. Perhaps tying your desired time to another habit will help, like sitting down to write as soon as that first cup of coffee is ready, or taking fifteen minutes to exercise after your dishes are washed.

Sacrifice

Third, make a sacrifice.

I love how that sounds like you’re giving up a vital component to complete a quest. But it’s true. If you make time for a new habit in your life, something else gets pushed out of that time, doesn’t it? If you want to carve out time in the morning to write, you’ll need to go to sleep earlier and can’t spend an hour scrolling through social media before bed. Or if you plan to write in the evening, perhaps that 8pm show will move to replay on Saturday time. It’s up to you to prioritize your time, but remember, we all only have 24 hours of it. So those people out there doing this thing you want to do, they had to make some sacrifices, too.

Trust

Fourth, trust yourself.

We all have that impostor within us that tells us we’re not good enough, or whispers that we won’t finish this thing we committed to. But if you’ve set up a strong vision, you have time carved out and decided on how to find it, and you have all of your reminders ready to go on your phone, then you’ve set yourself up for success. Time to tell that impostor to go away, because you aren’t going to see this new year’s resolution through to completion.

Combined with SMART goals, you can use these four steps to make small changes in your life lead to new lifestyles. Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! With a new year comes resolutions and new goals. There’s a lot of misconception about goals out there, and many new year’s resolutions fall short. This month, I’m going to focus on setting goals and making the space in your life to achieve them so you can be sure your resolutions stick.

SMART Goals

You’ve made your New Year’s Resolution, but is it a SMART goal? Is it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound? As a middle school teacher, I’ve spent many years teaching my students how to set smart goals. I’m here to break down each step so you can set goals you’re sure to achieve.

Short-term vs Long-term

Many people set a long-term goal (as with resolutions) for the whole year and hope to achieve it, but become unmotivated when they haven’t changed their habits after a few days or weeks. An important thing to consider when setting your goals is to set both long-term and short-term goals. If you want to write a novel in a year, or drop 20 pounds in a year, you need short-term goals in addition to that long-term goal to step your way to success.

Let’s take a look at the novel example. You want to write a novel over the course of a year. This will look different for someone who has never finished a novel and for someone who has written several, but let’s say you’re someone who hasn’t finished a novel, you’ve never written 50,000 words in a month, and you struggle to write on a consistent basis.

You can make a goal of finishing a novel in a year, but you also need to look at the shorter-term goal. How much of that novel do you want to write in the first month? We’ll make the math easy and say you want to write a 120,000-word novel in a month. (Industry standards for length is a different conversation.) That means in the first month, you need to write 10,000 words, or about 40 pages. You would set a goal to write 10,000 words for a month.

Let’s break that down even further, because it takes three weeks to make a habit. And since our lives cycle on a daily and weekly basis–Monday gym, Tuesday therapy, Wednesday and Friday soccer–any goal you make to start a new habit should have a daily or weekly short-term goal.

This 10,000-word per month goal would break down to 2,500 words per week. (Yes, I’m assuming four even weeks. You’re welcome for the extra break days ;) ) Or 500 words over 5 days of the week. (That’s about 2 pages, double-spaced, per day.) If you want to make yourself a daily habit, that’s about 360 words a day.

Doesn’t 360 words feel a lot more manageable than 10,000? Yeah, our brains actually struggle to comprehend large numbers. It’s why, as a science teacher, I always use scale models of the solar system with my students. And for reference, this post, up to the period before this sentence, is 504 words. Now that you have a concept of how much writing you need to do everyday, or every week, you’re ready to set your SMART Goals.

Specific

The first step to setting a SMART goal is to choose something Specific. But Specific has a deeper meaning than just “be precise.” This goal has to be something that you have control over. Many of my students would set goals based on what grade they wanted to get. “I want to get a B.” It sounds specific, but do they have control over getting a B? Arguable. This goal isn’t specific enough. What does the student have control over? They can pay attention in class, they can raise their hand and participate, they can take notes, they can complete assignments and homework. They can answer in partial sentences with the least amount of information they think they need, or they can choose to add more detail.

Yes, your goals need to be THAT specific.

As another example. Let’s say someone wanted to drop 20 pounds in a year. We know how many pounds and we know how long it will take. It *sounds* specific. But like the grades example, it gives no hint at how those 20 pounds are going to fall off. (It really would be nice if we could just lose them by taking a couple of quick turns on a long walk, wouldn’t it?)

You want the specificity of your goal to be minute enough to name what you have control over. Specific enough that you can build an activity into your life to make this goal happen. What can you do to lose 20 pounds? You can eat healthier, count your calories, you can go to the gym, you can add more exercise by walking, and if these things aren’t working, you can get your hormones checked to make sure something isn’t preventing you from dropping the weight.

Start with smaller specifics.

Choose things you have THE MOST control over to start your goals, and pick what is easiest for you to change.

Yes, you need a specific goal, but you need to make sure it’s specific enough that it is something you have control over. So, take a look at your goal and brainstorm what you have control over and choose one thing you can change right now.

Measurable

The second part of a SMART goal is that it is measurable. Once you decide on the specific goal you can control, you can make it measurable. Say you want to participate more in class. Now you need to decide how often. Once each day? Three times per week? If you plan to write a certain amount of words, how often will you do that? Think about measurable things you might put on a star-sticker chart. How many times will you commit to testing out your goal, how many chances will you give yourself to earn a star sticker?

Remember to start with change at a small level, like every day or five days each week.

Smaller, more frequent goals you know you can achieve are going to give you the motivation to keep going toward the bigger goal for the year.

So, if you want to drop those 20 pounds, start by adding an extra 500 steps every day, or five days a week. And pick a time where you know you can add those steps. If you want to write a novel in a year, start by writing 200 words for five days each week. If you want to raise your grade to a B, start by writing out two sentence answers, or raising your hand three out of five days a week to answer the teacher’s questions. Maybe make sure you turn in two more assignments each week. Planning to walk for 20 minutes, three days a week? This is a perfectly measurable goal.

Measuring goals and coming out ahead of my goals is a huuuge motivator to me!

Notice how measurable goes hand-in-hand with specific? Once you identify the specific item in your control, measurable is how often you commit to doing that thing. It’s something you can measure, so go ahead and make your start chart!

Achievable

In a way, we’re already addressed this. A very specific goal, that focuses on items within your control will already be achievable. But it’s still good to give this goal a check-in with your life. You don’t want to go overboard. If you create a goal that is too hard for you to change your habits to meet, it becomes very unmotivating. You might want to go on a 20-minute walk 7 days a week, but there’s three things you’re already committed to on Saturday that leaves you completely drained. In this case, 7 days a week isn’t achievable.

When I make goals, I tend to low-ball them. I look at what I know I can do and set my goal a little lower than that. I know I can write 800 words per day, so I might make a goal to write 600 words. This way, if I have a very crazy, hectic day, I have some wiggle room so that my whole progress toward my goal doesn’t crash. I’ll have days where I’ve written 800 words or 1,000 words to balance out one where I can only sneak in 200. If I then look at my progress over a month, I can still meet my monthly goal even if I miss my daily goal.

Setting your goals up with what you know you can do, and not something that is a stretch for you, helps build small successes. And it’s those small successes that are key to big changes. So, take a look at the fledgling goal you have, and drop it just a little bit.

Relevant

A relevant goal is one that sits within the bigger picture. Really, this step comes first. At this point, if you’ve done the work of narrowing down your specific goal to one that is within your control, and breaks down a longer-term goal into a smaller stepping stone, then your goal should already be relevant. Focus on what you can control, and the work to create a smart goal is mostly done.

Time-Bound

I’ve already talked about short-term goals that act as stepping stones for your long-term goals. So this is the place where you decide how long is good. If you are trying to develop a brand new habit, you might want to set a couple of SMART goals for the first three or four weeks. It takes three weeks to get into a habit. After that, you might continue the weekly goals or try a few bi-weekly or monthly goals. Before you know it, you have yourself a series of SMART goals that develop new habits and conquer those new year resolutions!

Example SMART goals

A student who wants to raise their grade from a C to a B:

SMART goals:

I will answer questions in two complete sentences on three assignments for one week.

I will raise my hand and answer questions in class three times while also answering questions in two complete sentences for one week.

I will answer questions with three sentences, raise my hand once each class, and turn in every homework assignment for three weeks.

A person who wants to lose 20 pounds in a year:

SMART goals:

I will walk 20 minutes three days a week for two weeks.

I will walk 20 minutes five days a week for two weeks.

I will eat a salad for lunch two days a week for two weeks.

I will walk 20 minutes a day for five days and eat a salad three days a week for one month.

A writer who wants to write 120,000 words in a year:

SMART goals:

I will write 200 words a day for five of seven days for two weeks.

I will write 300 words a day for five of seven days for two weeks.

I will write 400 words a day for five of seven days for one month.

You now have the tools you need to make a SMART goal. Stay tuned to my next post that gives you four steps to carve out time to make sure these goals happen.

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After the Trilogy Finished

I didn’t stop writing when I finished my trilogy. I maintained the momentum I’d gained and continued onward. I had started the first half of my first book ten years before, and the end of it had already sat for two months while I proto-drafted the other two books. So I’d let it sit for ample time to start editing it, right?

I dove into edits. And while I used NaNoWriMo’s guide to editing a novel, I still didn’t entirely understand what it meant to make sure every scene had a purpose. I will say that it helped me cut a 37-page travel log that didn’t do much for the story. And helped me realize that a side character that comes in halfway through the book should actually have a POV because they carry the plot that gets resolved in the first book. And while I also changed the sex of a few characters (it was far too obvious that my inspiration was white male fantasy authors), there wasn’t much change in the story.

My First Critique Partner

I managed to find a critique partner who pointed out my exorbitant use of passive voice, and paused in my editing to immediately go back and start again. Though that experience was tough for me, to see the suggestions blotting out my pages, I recognized its value. There were flaws in my writing I didn’t realize. Things I had forgotten in my years without practice. Things that I had never learned. And it was hard. To go back and start again. To deal with the frustration that what I’d written on the first go around wasn’t everything I’d hoped it would be.

I was missing knowledge and practice (as mentioned in my last post). And I knew those were two things I could control.

I finished that second draft, and then a third that didn’t better the story more than the second. In between I had drafted another novel. A YA paranormal fantasy that spawned out of a writing prompt but had no direction to it. Two more novels followed, both middle grade fantasy, as well as some explorations into a second YA novel with the same characters and some dabbles into the fourth book in my epic fantasy series (which would start a second trilogy). I had all of these stories, but I knew none of them were ready to send out to try and publish. I didn’t know how to fix them. I was ignorant to what I needed, but I knew I needed something.

My Local Writing Group

I joined my local writing group, Writing Heights, in September of 2022 and attended their 2023 conference. Conferences are amazing things. A place where writers get together to learn more about their craft. A place to meet other writers. A place to meet presenters. I joined a workshop that examined the first pages of a novel and was taught by Jaye Viner. Jaye walked us through several examples, focusing on what we learned on the first page. Then we broke off and took time to critique each other’s first pages. I found the workshop very helpful and informative. After the conference, she offered to start a critique group and I signed up. I’ve learned so much about being part of a critique group and how to give feedback from that group. Jaye in particular has a way of pointing out flaws in beginnings that still leaves me in awe. I’ve taken the knowledge I’ve acquired into other critique groups I’ve joined, amazed that the first critique group I landed in is so solid and helpful.

Needing More

Armed with a place to get feedback on my work, I sat down and started to revise. But this time I wasn’t working on a new draft of my epic fantasy. This time I decided to work on the middle grade novel that felt like it had a fairly cohesive plot. Halfway through that second draft, my writing group offered a class on middle grade novels, taught by Meg Eden Kuyatt. It was in her class that I learned about a story having two plots, the external plot (the events that happen) and the internal plot (how the character changes). Two books she recommended to dive deeper into these plots were Save the Cat Writes a YA Novel by Jessica Brody (because there is no middle grade version), and Story Genius by Lisa Cron.

There had been other members in online writing groups that had recommended Save The Cat to me before, but at the time I had not thought I needed to rely on a book to learn about writing.

But after seven novels and no idea how to make them better, I reconsidered. I realized there were things I did not know. Being a scientist and having a husband who heavily researches everything before he buys a product, I caved. I recognized that if I wanted to fix my novels, if I wanted to write something to the point where it would be polished enough to query, I needed to do more research on the craft of writing.

And so, I bought my first craft book and took a deep dive into plot structure.

Stay tuned for more writing adventures!

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I had dabbled of course. When my teacher asked me what I wanted to be in first grade, I said, “An artist,” even though I didn’t know the first thing about drawing. A cousin who was four years older was taking art classes, and his drawings looked pretty, so that was good enough for me. Of course, I abandoned that when I realized that I would need to actually be good at drawing to be an artist.

I gave pour painting a try, as an adult, figuring you can’t mess something up that just flows across the canvas. That’s when I learned how important the right materials are. But realistic drawings? Me? *Looks over shoulder* You’re kidding right?

And yet, I’ve reached the point in my life where I understand a simple, yet true, fact. If I can call myself a writer because I write, then I can call myself an artist because I draw. And writing, like art, takes the right materials and practice. Lots and lots of practice.

But before I get into the story of how I became an artist, I want to share an experience I had with all of you.

Knowledge, Materials, Practice

As a teacher, I often go to trainings to enrich my craft. One of these trainings was on techniques to help students dive deeper into thinking about the content they’re learning. The facilitator of this training led us through an exercise. She asked us all to stand in one of four corners of the room while she read off some skills. The four corners were: I know nothing, I’m a beginner, I have some knowledge, I’m an expert. And she listed things such as sewing, woodworking, cooking, baking. We arranged ourselves around the room according to our skill level. And then she asked us, “What would it take for you to get from the corner you’re standing in to the next corner?” And each time the answer was the same:

Knowledge.

Materials.

Practice.

This is the secret to how I became an artist.

Knowledge exists at our fingertips. The internet allows one to find how to do just about anything with a quick search. It’s how I learned to repair my dishwasher and my furnace. Materials are listed in websites and videos, purchasable in the comfort of your own home. Practice. There’s the rub. You will have to sacrifice your precious time to practice. In an age where knowledge and materials come nearly instantly, this is the one that trips people up. But, in learning, in writing, in art, in anything you do, you only get better with practice. No one was born great, they had to work to get there.

And the person who encouraged me to do more art understood exactly that.

Art through Writing

One morning in January of 2023, I woke to a shiny new prompt from my daily writing forum channel. “If your character could have the perfect pet, what would it be?”

Ooooohhh! A perfect pet? You know what? I have a fantasy world that has no dragons. What if I gave my main character, my lovely trauma-dumpling, a dragon?

💡

Sure, it would be an alternate universe. I didn’t know why I had excluded dragons from my epic fantasy, but I did. So this dragon could be anything I wanted it to be. It could do anything I wanted it to do. It became the perfect pet. A pet that if it actually existed in my story, would break the entire plot.

First, I would make the dragon empathic, or telepathic, like the people in my novel. And it would have healing tears, like a phoenix, to soothe the awful things my character goes through. (Whoops, just took the role of the LI.) Of course it will breathe fire. AND it’s a tiny shoulder dragon most of the time, but it can shape-shift into a gargantuan protector if my character needs it to (goodbye mentor and protector).

It is such a perfect pet. My character would grow to be an entirely different person, bonded to a dragon, able to face anything that comes her way. Yup. Goodbye, plot.

What a fun writing prompt!

I wrote out the story, imitating a fairy tale, and shared it with the group.

And then, I started to sketch.

Not much, at first, just a few spirals in a notebook. Spirals that grew a body and a head, a tail and wings. And I also shared them with the group. I was having fun sketching my little shoulder dragon. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Then, another member of said writing group, graphic novelist GS Silva, proposed a challenge.

The Challenge

Could I sketch 100 dragons before she finished 100 comic panels?

I accepted the challenge. And I will not keep you in suspense. I failed that challenge. Spectacularly. To this date, I don’t believe I’ve made it 60% of the way there. (Below 60% is failing in my local district.)

I failed.

And yet, I won.

Not her challenge, but my own.

I knew from the start, I wouldn’t get there. Come on. Writing is my first passion. Most of my snatched spare minutes were for creating words, not pictures. And surely this dragon wouldn’t hold my attention long. But I gave it a fair shot. Honest, I did.

I started with a to-scale color drawing of the dragon, for my enjoyment (and because I’m a science teacher, and love when things are shown to scale, like the solar system, because it’s not shown that way in textbooks).

And then, I was prompted to learn more about shading. I remembered my lesson on materials, and picked up a sketchbook, proper art pencils, and a kneadable eraser.

Some of these writing friends were doing the February Faces art challenge and I decided to join in, sketching my dragon and his mistress to satisfy the prompts. Sometimes they were quick sketches, sometimes I put in more effort. But I was getting practice.

And yearning to explore more.

Starting to Study

I decided for Valentine’s Day to draw the main couple from my novel. My two star-crossed lovers who love deeply and go through so much together. I found a guide for drawing two people kissing, and I pulled out my low-end-but-not-Crayola set of colored pencils to bring them to life. I watched a few YouTube tutorials for this and found my favorite guide: Kirsty Partridge. An artist that took time in her videos to give details about how to get a realistic appearance in drawings.

I managed some realistic quality, but it was a far cry from perfect. I was satisfied though. That’s what practice is for.

I sketched more, I drew more, I watched more. Then I decided to do a portrait of my main female character. The one who earned herself a dragon. But first, I needed to tackle her eyes. This was my first real study. My first attempt wasn’t anything realistic. But I watched KP’s videos on how to draw eyes, I slowed myself down, I practiced using my pencils lightly, adding lots of layers of color, and I managed to make a small part of an eye come out like the reference picture.

Then I drew the whole eye.

Amazing what time and patience and paying attention to detail will do.

What knowledge, materials, and practice will do.

Every time I see this photo, every time I open up to that page in my sketchbook, I can’t believe I drew it. Me. I did that.

I won my friend’s challenge better than either of us could imagine. I was ready to call myself an artist.

But the journey doesn’t end there. Stay tuned for more.

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When I began my decade-long writing hiatus, I had reached a place where I questioned my expertise. I had never been in a similar situation to the characters I was writing about. I was unsure of myself. I was unsure of how the story was going and what I needed to do with it to end it. I had gotten myself into an arc that completely sidetracked from what I thought the story was going to be. And, though November began with a fervent release of words I’d held in my head for ten years, I was afraid my previous fears would resurface and prevent me from finishing the book.

During those first days on NaNo forums, I sought writing advice and found it. Moreover, it turned out to be the most Timely, and most Fit For Me writing advice. I received exactly what I needed. Two ideas that would carry me through to finish the first draft of my first novel. Two phrases that encouraged me to keep going, no matter what. The first piece of advice: You can’t edit a blank page.

You Can’t Edit a Blank Page

This first phrase said more to me than it seems. It wasn’t just about getting words out. It was encouragement that I could always make them better. It was freeing. I could add to the story in any way I wished, and later I could go back and improve upon them. It gave me permission to be a fraud, permission to play, permission to accept the craziest imaginings and put them on the page. For me, it was hugely motivating. All I had to do was get the story out. Then I could go back, and use this magic trick called editing, and fix it. That kept the words flowing. I had permission to use my first draft to get ideas on the page. Later, I would edit.

Finish the Draft Before you Edit

My writing seems to come in layers, like that of an onion. The more I write, the more I learn about the story and the characters. It wasn’t long before I had a realization and I knew I would need to change something from the beginning of the story. This was where the second piece of advice kept my forward momentum: Don’t go back and edit. Leave a comment if you need to and continue writing the story as if you had already made the change.

Some writers struggle with this, insisting that they can’t move on while there are unresolved issues at the beginning of the book. That’s totally fine. We all have different processes. The problem comes when you have gone back to the beginning multiple times before you’ve reached the end. If you have re-started over and over and over again without ever reaching the end of your novel, I encourage you to give this method a try. Fight the urge to fix and give yourself permission to move on. Chances are, something else will come up near the ending you’ll want to change, too. Leave a comment and fix both of them in the next draft instead of starting again twice more.

I took the advice without any second thoughts, leaving a comment in my doc and pushing ahead through the novel. Again, I was free to watch the story unfold. I let go of my perfectionism and focused on finishing.

Reaching The End

Armed with these two practices, I kept writing and writing and writing. I refused to look at a blank page, I refused to go back to the beginning, I kept moving ever forward, ever onward, until I reached the final page of my first novel and wrote “the end.” It took me twenty-five years to write my first novel. The second half, the half I composed during November of 2021, took me nineteen days. What advice has aided your writing?

When I was in third grade, my classroom library had a cute little book called Problems at the North Pole. This is a fun, humorous, story that stresses the value of teamwork. The most striking thing for me was that the author was seven-years-old. Younger than I was. She wrote a whole book and got it published. And I was older. A lightbulb turned on inside my head. If a seven-year-old can write and publish a book, then I can, too. I started on my own book about cats, pouring over my family’s copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to research facts. It was a project that I never finished. The first of many.

What was Started was Never Finished

For many years I started writing projects that had hints of The Boxcar Children, The Babysitter’s Club, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The Uncanny X-Men, all media I absorbed. But though I would start a project, and figure out the characters in the story, and perhaps have a problem the character would face, I never got much farther than a few scenes and then I would start working on a new idea.

During my senior year of high school, my teacher asked the class if we wrote in our free time. I shared that I had a lot of stories I’d started, but never finished. I remember the moment clearly. She looked at me, her glasses stem tapping on her lips, and said “Hmm. I wonder why you never finish?”

I didn’t have an answer.

A Novel Begins

After that conversation, I decided I would work on one story until I finished. I had a fairly new idea that I chose as The One. It was the beginning of a dark fantasy, a world torn by war, a character torn by grief. For the next ten years, I worked on this story, one scene at a time, bit by tiny bit, compiled in notebooks and on 3.5” floppy disks. I explored the characters and their backstory, slowly building a world, thinking I was building a story.

After all that time, I grew brave enough to share it with my partner. He read a little of what I had compiled and asked me, “What’s the plot?”

Again, I had no answer. I had written a loosely connected chunk of scenes. I focused on the characters and what they were going through. Well, it was about time to sit down and write some plot.

I again turned to the media I had absorbed for inspiration. One of my main characters is heavily influenced by Amberdrake from The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey. The war in my novel is likely influenced by the mage wars in that story. Another character is a combination of Jean Grey from The Uncanny X-Men and Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. So the plot? Fantasy books I was reading at the time were part of The Wheel of Time series and A Song of Ice and Fire. I also liked the idea of crystals, having just moved to Tucson, AZ and visiting the gem show. I must have recently watched The Dark Crystal, too. Thus, my plot developed, a combination of the three. And for the first time, I knew I was starting from the beginning of my story (the sixth(?) beginning at this point).

With the direction of a loose plot, I was able to write from start to finish. Over the next few years, my manuscript grew to 60,000 words. I was proud of myself. I stopped. I read it. I shared a small portion of it. And then…

I lost my confidence.

I let impostor syndrome take over. Who was I to write a war story? I’d never served in any military. The discipline I created was borne from martial arts training, but was a far cry from troop deployment strategies or supply chains. I was working into the latter part of the novel, where characters needed to conduct negotiations, and while I might negotiate with seventh graders everyday to encourage them to complete assignments, surely that isn’t the same as negotiating with whole villages of people.

And then life happened. I got married. I had a child, one with more needs more than most. I moved away from a supportive community. I had a second child. I lost my father. Life happened.

I set aside my book.

I set aside my writing.

I chose other creative outlets.

I stopped.

For ten years.

Re-Kindling

Many authors discovered writing during COVID. I didn’t. Not at first. I did have that big pause in my life where I wondered who I was and what my goals were. I had to decide what I wanted and if it was enough for me to sacrifice my time for. It wasn’t March of 2020 that I picked up my writing. It took me a year and a half to finally acknowledge that there was a dream deferred that I wasn’t as ready to let go of as I first thought.

The final push to get back into it? An excerpt from How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett and an episode of Squid Games. An unlikely combo, surely.

I’ll start with Squid Games. I watched the first episode with my husband and it disturbed me. So much blood. Such intensity. I needed to do something to get the ick out of my system. I turned to the novel that had been churning in my head for 25 years and I picked a place in the timeline that displayed emotion and blood and I wrote it out.

Just a little cleansing exercise. A bit of catharsis. No opening the old doc. One scene. A few characters processing an event.

Then, I was introduced to Arnold Bennett’s work. A mentor read aloud the first chapter of his essay How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. Fire ignited inside me.

We are only allotted 24 hours to do as we wish. No more. No less. No one gets to hoard time. But we can all choose to squander it. “We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is” (Benett, 7).

If writing was something I wanted to do, then I had better dedicate time to doing it.

A Dream Deferred

Within a week of hearing that excerpt and reading it for myself, I opened up my nearly forgotten document. I spent a weekend completely absorbed. I read what I wrote. I picked a spot and started re-writing.

This was the last weekend of October in 2021. I remembered there was this writing event called NaNoWriMo. I checked how much writing I could do and how long it took me. I calculated that getting 1,667 words everyday would take me about an hour and a half. I could do that.

I signed up on the first of November. I wrote every day. I stayed above par.

I finished my first novel on the 19th.

But the month was far from over, and I was so close to 50,000 words. Besides, the first book was only the first in a trilogy. So, I started the second book on the 20th. By the end of January, I had a proto-draft of the complete trilogy. It took me thirty years to write one novel. And three months to write three.

Langston Hughes asked in his poem Harlem. “What happens to a dream deferred?” For me, it gathered dust for ten years. Then, it exploded.

And I knew I wasn’t done. The story would need edits. I knew it wasn’t pretty. It was my first draft.

But, I had a daily writing habit.

I re-kindled my first creative outlet (and my favorite).

Even though I wrote “The End” on the last page of my trilogy, I knew this was only “The Beginning” of my writing journey.

What twists and turns have you, dear readers, navigated in your writing journeys?

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Works Cited

Bennett, Arnold. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. Hard Press, 2006.

Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. University of Missouri Press (BkMk Press), 2002.

Hello Substack community! I’m Dierdre and I write fantasy for all ages! I have several novels proto-drafted and ready for cleaning up, and a writing process that took many of those novels to come to fruition. Hopefully, I will revisit the prior novels and clean them up and send them out into the world. My goal as a writer is to be traditionally published and I am currently querying my first polished novel. It’s a post-modern middle grade fantasy about a girl who finds her voice.

Join me as I share my writing journey and the things I learn along the way.

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