Recently, I set a writing goal to finish a proposal for a nonfiction book.
For those of you who have never done a book proposal, it is something like writing a Master’s Thesis–lots of work, lots of writing.
On Monday of that week, I set the goal to finish the book proposal by that Friday and get it off to an agent who waited to see it. It was a self-imposed goal but one that I believed I could accomplish within that time. I had much of the proposal pieces already written, but I still needed to work on Promotion and About the Book, plus I had to finish writing Chapter One and write Chapter Two.
By Friday morning, I knew I wasn’t going to accomplish the original goal. Chapter One was taking longer than I anticipated and Chapter Two was twisting me up. So I let the agent know it would arrive on Saturday.
I didn’t beat myself up. I didn’t feel like a failure. I adjusted my goal and sent it off late Saturday night, close enough to my original deadline to feel successful.
At conferences and workshops, writers are often advised to write every day, commit to writing so many pages a day, so many words a day, etc. And then they listen as other writers speak about completing 3, 4, or more books a year.
So, determined to be serious about writing, they’ll return home determined to change their ways. They set ambitious goals, goals that are too ambitious for where they start from. When they fail to meet those goals, their inner critics string them up by their wrists and deliver forty lashes.
This is not conducive to creativity. As a book coach, I am definitely not in favor of a laissez-faire attitude toward your writing or other creative work, but I really hate it when clients come to me with heads bowed, beating their chests while chanting, “Mea culpa, mea culpa.”
Why would you keep writing if you were going to constantly experience that? 
The key is to set a daily or weekly (whichever works best for you) goal that is dead easy to meet.
So your goal today could be to write one sentence or one paragraph. For the week, it could be one page or write for one hour.
Because if you make that goal so easy that you achieve it, you’ll happily set and meet another goal. And another.
Set doable goals. And a warning…don’t get a swelled head about meeting goals and decide that just because you wrote two paragraphs last week you can write 20 this week.
What you are working toward is momentum and repeatable success that will assure you that even if you have a bad day, week or month, that you CAN do it. You can write and keep writing.
Yes, you can.
And if you’d like help setting goals and finally writing the story that’s been chasing itself around in your head, email me.