Writing Goals for 2024: Develop a Practice
This time of year—at least, my experience of it—operates in a liminal space between future and past: a space that, bizarrely, wants little to do with the present. Maybe not between future and past—maybe rather with one foot on each shore, while the river of time piddles between unnoticed. I am not a fan of the end of the year, except insofar as there is a new year that starts right after it. I am a fan of the reflection we are prone to do as the year closes: Spotify wrapped and its imitators, what we liked this year, what we wrote this year, our achievements, our successes.
It’s looking ahead that’s causing me trouble: I have no idea how to set goals for a writing practice that has been taking a well-needed hibernation. Between the years of 2016 and 2021, I wrote more than 300,000 words each year; my highest total was 489,000, a number incomprehensibly high to me now that I write at a much more adjusted pace. Several factors produced this adjustment: I stopped writing as a hobby to professionalize my writing; a few years after that, realizing the cost of expediency to my craft, I stopped trying to make self-publishing happen. And then there was no going back. Having professionalized my writing, there was no returning to the hobby-writing days of yore. No longer trying to follow a growth plan, I no longer had the drive to write at a deliberate rate. Often I found myself with no writing drive at all.
I have tried a few things to get my writing back on track, but it’s taken time. In mid-November of this year I had a thought that allowed me to take an old novel project out of the drawer, and only since then have I felt able to produce words and actualize ideas in a way that made me proud. Other factors intervened to deprioritize fiction writing for me this year: I have started writing for work again, this time as a copywriter; and I am studying to become a translator, which involves a great deal of composition, albeit adapted from someone else's work.
I don’t regret the time I’ve taken away. It has been essential. I’ve been able to pick up a number of balls I’d let fall in the great juggle over the years. My skills have only solidified with distance, in part because I have practiced them—composition in translation; editing in work and play—quite studiously in non-writing forms.
But as my school schedule eases up and I find myself contemplating what I find truly important in life, it feels like time to take up the mantle again. The end-of-year future-looking shore invites me to make goals. The trouble is I’ve never had this relationship with writing before. I began writing in March 2004, wrote more than ten thousand words that month, and—until eighteen months ago—very seldom broke that pace. I realize now that I have no idea how to build up a writing practice from next to nothing.
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But this thinking framework is what got me in trouble in the first place. Just before I took my writing hiatus, I had a daily quota of 2,000 words a day, 5 days a week (or the more frequent 1500 words, 7 days a week). I met this quota sometimes, exceeded it others. This pace was set in an attempt to meet the self-publishing logic that, once you publish 20 books (ideally in 5 years), you might make as much as $50,000/year if you market yourself correctly.
I did not make it to 20 books. In 2021, I did release 4 times, though not quite as hoped or planned. By the time I was almost finished my fifth book in March of 2022, I was burned out enough that I abandoned that book at 90% completion, and abandoned the career while I was at it. Both still sit untouched since then.
I was certainly capable of getting the words down fast enough to make this pace work, and by that time in my writing journey, I was also skilled—more importantly, practiced—enough that I could pen a highly readable draft on the first try. But I was running into two major obstacles to my success as a self-publishing author. One was loving the process of self-editing—and its product—far more than “mere” composition. Self-editing is something you absolutely cannot do very much of if you want to self-publish at the required rate for success.
Let me be clear: my quota was not to write 2,000 words a day; it was to gain 2,000 words a day, as in, from the previous day’s total. Editing was anathema to this goal. I would edit for 5-6 hours and wind up with a manuscript that was 2,500 words lower than I began. 2,000 words a day I could do, but I could not do that and make up the word count deficits created by editing.
The other obstacle was that my readership’s growth was not happening at the rate I had hoped, mainly because I stubbornly refused to write to market. I was only able to write at the pace I did because I wrote what I was passionate about. If I didn’t follow my passion, I wasn’t going to become motivated enough to hit word count to make it work. But my passion wasn’t selling.
I look back now and see these “ruining” priorities as assets to me as a writer, and to my craft in general. The day I realized I valued refining my craft more than I valued output was a real character development moment. It was very hard for me to throw in the towel on the goal of being a self-employed writer when I had put at least 18 months, arguably four years, into the task. I tried a couple of other iterations of “writing for a living” as I spiralled out from that, but ultimately joined Augur Magazine in an attempt to keep myself in the literary world; applied for my current graduate program in translation; and forgot how to write without an externally provided brief.
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On December 1 of this year, I woke up, looked at the date on my phone, and felt a burst of excitement it took me a while to source. It dated back to the days when I religiously kept track of my writing output: the first of the month meant a new word count spreadsheet. Endless potential for achievement. No more looking at the disappointments of the preceding 4 weeks every time I opened the damn thing.
After I felt that excitement, I sat down and wrote a bad version of this post. Near the end of that post, I wrote: “It took me a moment to place the feeling, but felt like an old, dear ritual. Like finding something within myself that had been dormant for a while.”
I edited that post for a couple of days, unsure why it didn’t feel ready to post. Part of it was that, instead of writing fiction, I was editing and re-editing the same blog post about wanting to write more fiction. I would open my novel document and close it again. If what I had written in the post was not manifesting into practice, how could I stand by the theory?
The problem was that I had set myself a quantitative goal: to sit down and write, even if just to scroll through the document, once a day in the month of December. Something about that wasn’t sitting right with me. It was a goal I had created trying to eliminate quantitative goals, but of course it remained a goal whose success was highly measurable, that I could track on a spreadsheet.
I experienced the same unease earlier this week when trying to think about my goals for 2024: I could not for the life of me sort out how to set a writing goal that wasn’t quantitative. This began to trouble me severely. I know I want to write more—want, as I had written to myself two weeks ago, to rediscover that old lost friend of ritual.
When I think about “building up a writing practice from next to nothing,” or what that ritual looks like, I think about getting to a place where I am writing 500 words per day between my other little projects. About carving out 20 minutes to write on a day-to-day basis, even if it means my obligations get delayed by those 20 minutes. But, again, these are quantitative terms. I don’t think they ritualize creativity; I think they ritualize productivity.
There are times when hard/specific writing goals are highly appropriate—in the service of meeting deadlines, say. But that’s not what I’m interested in setting up for myself at this time. I’m not trying to complete a manuscript by a certain date. What I am looking for—what I abandoned when I tried to professionalize my writing in the first place—is the joy involved in curating a manuscript. A lot of the joy in writing for me comes out of editing my earlier drafts: removing words, sometimes entire chapters, rewriting them to make a better version of what was there before; workshopping. Like sitting at a pottery wheel and caressing a lump of clay into a new shape slowly, a bit at a time. That is the sort of ritual I most miss.
I have been privileged this year to work and study in fields that develop my skills. Between translation projects, copywriting work, editing for Augur, and editing for freelance clients, I have often found myself opening my laptop to an open document and getting so involved in it that I forget the reason I opened my laptop in the first place.
That is what I most miss about writing: to open my document and immediately find something that interests me about it, that I want to work on. To delve in and do that work without hesitation.
I am talking, I eventually realized, about establishing a writing practice.
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My only writing goal for 2024 is to regularly do it. I don’t know what “regularly” looks like. I just want to do the act of writing—more. I don’t want or need to finish my manuscript, or to complete any short stories. I don’t know what I’m going to work on or when, or for how long. I am not, at this time, trying to grow my career. In the last year I have stopped reading books linearly—I tend to pick one up, put it aside, pick another up, finish another I started last month, stack two more by my bedside to read the first chapter of, then go back to the first and get a hundred pages deep there. I have been rereading The Great Gatsby a chapter at a time since June. Going back to school, what has interested me has not been the number of books I read, but the act of reading. I just want to read. I don’t care what, or how much, or when, or for how long, or in what format. I just want to read.
My goal for 2024 is to feel that way about writing. I just want to write. I don’t care what, or how much, or when, or for how long, or in what format. I just want to write, and I hope that I do. I hope I self-edit until I’m well and truly in the weeds. I hope I reread and jump around and reorganize and delete. I hope I spend six hours at a time making more weird, sprawling conlang mind maps like I did last month trying to figure out nomenclature conventions for a manuscript I have not meaningfully started yet. My goal is just to enjoy this work, and to practice.
This newsletter is one of things I am doing to work toward that idea of practice—thank you very much for reading. I hope your writing goals spark just as much joy for you this year.