Writing Resolutions Emma Crees
At the beginning of last year my main New Year’s Resolution
was that 2014 would be the year that I completed a novel. By the end of it I’d have a draft ready to
send out to agents. Fast forward one
year and I don’t actually have a finished draft ready to go. I have a huge chunk of a draft and following
some feedback at the Creative Writing Masterclass where Heidi-Jo and I met I’m
redrafting and making big changes to make it better. So I’m ok with not meeting my goal.
With that in mind, I wanted to set some more writing
resolutions for 2015. But having learned
my lesson I wanted them to be a bit less specific. If I’m very specific about my goals it’s
harder to reach them and all too easy to beat myself up about that when life
gets in the way. I think this year I probably need to be more realistic.
My heart belongs to blogging. It’s something I’ve done since
before it was called blogging (I wrote my first entry in 2000) and my current
blog – A Writer In A Wheelchair – has content dating back to 2006. Something I’d really like is to do more with
my blog. So my first goal is to blog
more regularly. I was going to set a
goal of writing three posts a week but some weeks I don’t have anything to say. Instead, I’m setting a goal of 10 blog
entries a month including two book reviews.
Which leads me on to my second goal – make time to read every
day. It probably seems like a strange
goal to have on a list of writing resolutions.
I always feel inspired when I read and reading a good book can be
helpful when trying to work out how best to handle things like dialogue which I
struggle with writing.
I’d like to write something five days out of seven this
year. I think I can achieve a lot if I
do that. And I also think that I can easily find the time to write on a daily
basis. I do waste a lot of time on twitter and Facebook which I could cut
down. Hopefully anyway it’s all too easy
to say “I’ll just check twitter for five minutes and then write…” and surface
again 40 minutes later with no time for anything and no words written… I’ve been thinking along the lines of trying
to write 5000 words a week. That’s about
half an hour each of those five days of writing but I’m keeping it
flexible. As I write this it’s 9th
January and I’m already thinking that it’s not a goal I’ve met in the first
week of the year. Must try harder next
week!
And as for my novel? Well, I plan to keep working on it. I would love to have it finished and ready to
send out to agents by the end of the year.
But that’ll be my secret wishful thinking goal (that I’ve now just
shared with everyone who reads this post).
I’m looking forward to working on these goals throughout
2015 but I must admit to being unsure whether more specific goals like I had
last year might have been better. Please
feel free to come over to my own blog or twitter
and bug me about them, particularly when it gets to roughly June and no one’s
even heard me mention writing for about five months. I’ll be really grateful (even if I look like
I’m frustrated when you ask.)
Nice to meet you. Well done on your resolutions. Just followed you on Twitter and look forward to reading your blog and your future book x
ReplyDeleteHi, Emma. Good to meet you. I enjoyed reading your resolutions. How lovely to have a reading resolution alongside the writing ones! Good luck with all the re-drafting and editing. I'll now go and find you on Twitter. x
ReplyDeleteThanks both! It's nice to meet you, I really like meeting other writers. Hopefully I've found you on twitter. x
ReplyDelete