How to set (and achieve) your writing goals for 2023

BY ALISON COLWELL

A goal without a plan is just a wish,” said Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

One of the best things about a new year is blank journals and the intoxicating list of new resolutions. At the beginning of the year, anything seems possible. I’m a huge goal setter and I believe that anyone who’s trying to achieve their bucket-list dreams needs to set goals. But you can’t stop there. Once you have a goal, you need to “reverse engineer” it to figure out what steps are needed to reach it.

I’ll admit I like to be organized, but I believe that creating a plan for a goal is a strategy that anyone can undertake. Follow these seven steps to achieve your 2023 writing goals.

1. What do you want?

Setting goals helps us figure out where we want to get in life. So first, spend some time creating a list of what you want to achieve this year. Some goals might be:

• Write the first draft of your book

• Get something you’ve written published

• Submit your work one hundred times

• Improve your writing craft

• Create a blog

• Write a new short story or essay every week

• Find a writing community that supports you

• Learn how to give helpful critiques to other writers

• Revise the first draft of your book

2. Where are you now?

You need to choose a goal that is both realistic and sustainable. To do that, it helps to take a long look at your current habits and life. Did you set goals last year? Did you follow through and achieve success? If you didn’t, do you know what went wrong? What are your current writing habits?

Suppose your goal is two hours of daily writing. If you spend four hours every day on social media, then maybe that’s a manageable goal, but if you’re a busy parent with two kids and a full-time job, then maybe a daily writing practice is too big of a stretch. Take a good long look at where you are now. You need to be honest about where you’re starting from.

3. What can you control?

Look at your list of goals and try to focus on elements that you can control. For example, you can’t control being published, but you can control how much you submit. You need to choose goals that are within your control. Then you’ll have the power to make your goals come true.

4. Choose one goal

You can’t accomplish everything all at once. If you take on too many, or if your goals are impossibly hard, then you’ll fail and end up berating yourself, which doesn’t help you or your writing practice. Look at your list and pick just one goal for this year.

5. Reverse engineer your goal

Here’s where you get creative. First, write your goal at the bottom of a piece of blank paper. Now consider the step that might come just before that one. It’s important to think in small, baby steps. You are going to create a list of all the different things that have to happen before you can achieve your goal, a list that leads from where you want to be to where you are now.

For example, if you want to Write the first draft of your book, write that on the bottom of the page. Now what comes just above that?

Write eighty thousand words. Which seems pretty huge when written like that, so let’s break it down. You have an entire year, so you only need to write 6,670 words per month or 220 words per day.

Look at where you are now and decide the best way to tackle this—e.g., daily, or one writing day per week. Can you give up your lunch breaks and write for that time? Or go for coffee after work and write in the coffee shop for thirty minutes? Or get up an hour earlier each day to write? Or can you dedicate one weekend day entirely to writing? Decide which is best for you, and then write it on the page. Write two thousand words every weekend.

Now make the commitment to yourself and your writing goals. Pin your engineered plan next to your desk or some place that you’ll see it every day. Then begin with the first step at the top.

6. Review your plan

As writers, we want to build a practice that will sustain us in the long term. Sometimes we’ll mess up—we won’t follow through, or life will intervene. Allow yourself some flexibility. Take time to review your plan, whether that’s monthly, quarterly, or after six months. It’s important to check in with yourself to see if you’re still on track or if your goals have changed. Be kind to yourself, and with grace you can always come back to your practice.

I’d planned to write one story a week in 2022. But in October I decided I wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo. It’s okay to change your goals. It’s okay if your goals shift. Just tweak your plan and carry on.

7. Achieve your goals!

If you follow through on your plan, I believe you can achieve your 2023 writing goals and get to where you want to be. My own road map for 2022 is still pinned to the corkboard in my study. And while I haven’t completed everything on it, I’ve had a great year with ninety-six submissions and five acceptances. I’ve got a long way to go as a writer, but with a good plan, I believe I can get there. You can too.

Alison Colwell is the executive director of the Galiano Community Food Program, a charity on Galiano Island. Her fiction can be found in DSF, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Drabble, and Tangled Locks, and her creative non-fiction in Folklife Magazine, Fieldstone Review, and the climate-fiction anthology Rising Tides.