{"id":7288,"date":"2016-02-15T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritelife.com\/?p=7288"},"modified":"2016-03-10T21:39:43","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T02:39:43","slug":"meet-writing-goals-production-schedule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/?p=7288","title":{"rendered":"Determined to Meet Your Writing Goals? Set Up a Production Schedule"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is an excerpt from <\/span><\/i>Shut Up and Write: The No-Nonsense, No B.S. Guide to Getting Words on the Page<\/span><\/i>, available February 18. Mridu is giving away three free copies of her new book! Comment on this post for your chance to win \u2014 after two weeks, we\u2019ll randomly choose a winner to receive a copy.\u00a0Update: Congratulations to Katherine K., Robyn C. and Jay L.!\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a truth that changed my life: Those 30 unfinished projects I have lying on the backburner? I\u2019m not going to be able to finish them all this year. <\/span><\/p>\n

Shocking, I know. But if you\u2019re anything like me, you secretly hope you\u2019re going to make tiny bits of progress on each of them and then, magically, they\u2019ll get finished in one go. It doesn\u2019t work like that. <\/span>Ever<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even if you\u2019re <\/span>prolific writer<\/span><\/a> with no life (guilty\u2014 I wrote 240,000 words in the last six months in personal projects alone), you\u2019re still only going to be able to tackle between two and 10 projects a year. There are people who write a book a year and others, like novelist <\/span>Dean Wesley Smith<\/span><\/a>, who can write a novel a month. <\/span><\/p>\n

You decide where you fall on this productivity scale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even if you were superhuman like Smith and wrote a quality novel a month, that still means that you have to pick 10 ideas from your long list (I\u2019m hoping you will take a few weeks off here and there to recharge your batteries). <\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us to the difficult task of picking projects that are the most important, the most beneficial to our careers, or the most potentially profitable. Then we must run with them. <\/b><\/p>\n

At the beginning of this year, I undertook the maddening exercise of selecting ideas. It drove me nuts. Of all the dozens of ideas I wanted to be working on, how on earth was I going to pick six or fewer? This is where the whole \u201cbeing realistic\u201d thing comes into play. Sure, you could <\/span>pretend<\/span><\/i> you\u2019re going to write two novels and three nonfiction books in a year while blogging three times a week and bringing in freelancing work to pay the bills. All on top of raising your three children. <\/span><\/p>\n

But deep inside, you know the truth. It\u2019s not going to happen. Aren\u2019t you better off picking a project and sticking with it? Isn\u2019t it better to finish it, send it out into the world and hopefully make money with it? Or perhaps you learn from your mistakes and move on to the next. Isn\u2019t that a saner way to do things?<\/span><\/p>\n

I have a gazillion ideas that beg for my attention every single day. When that happens, I throw them into an idea file. I have projects selected for the year and I will focus on them. Next year, I will make another list, pick again, and every idea will get its chance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once you\u2019re done with the step involving picking your projects for the year, you should think about how long each will take. Do you need a whole year to finish your novel, or can you get it done sooner? Perhaps it will take even longer. How are you to know?<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the best ways I know to estimate how long a project will take is this:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Figure out how many new words you can write in an hour.<\/b> We\u2019re talking new words and not rewriting. For me and most writers I know, this number is around 1,000.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. \u00a0Think about how many hours a week you have available that you can devote to writing new words.<\/b> Again, we\u2019re talking first draft, new words only. If you need to <\/span>revise<\/span><\/a> work, set a different time in your week to do that. You don\u2019t want to mix the writing part of your brain with the revising part, because that\u2019s what leads to five-year novels. Trust me, I know. Let\u2019s say that this number is five hours. That is, you can <\/span>devote one hour a day to writing<\/span><\/a> new words while taking weekends off. This means you can write a minimum of 5,000 new words a week.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
        \n
      1. What\u2019s going to be the total length of this work?<\/b> Sometimes this is hard to predict. Almost always, however, you\u2019ll have a rough idea. If you\u2019re writing a nonfiction book such as this one, you know it\u2019s more likely to be in the 30,000-word range rather than the 100,000-word range. Similarly, mainstream fiction will be 80,000 words and romance novels will run a lot lower. Based on the scope and market of your project, how many words do you think your project is likely to run? For the purpose of this discussion, let\u2019s say that number is 60,000.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
          \n
        1. Let\u2019s do some math now, shall we? <\/b>If your manuscript is 60,000 words and you\u2019re writing at a pace of 5,000 words a week, you can easily deduce that if you work diligently, show up at the page each day, and write your 5,000 words for the week regularly, you will have a completed first draft in 12 weeks, or three months. If all your manuscripts are similar in length, you could easily finish four manuscripts by the end of the year, working only an hour a day. Not bad.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
            \n
          1. Finally, pick a daily target and put aside everything else and focus on hitting that day after day, consistently.<\/b> This target could be project-based, such as \u201cone short story a week,\u201d or process-based, such as \u201c1,000 words a day.\u201d It could even be time-oriented, such as \u201cone hour a day.\u201d Choose what works for you, but make sure it helps you feel positive and optimistic about coming to work every day. By focusing on the daily target and not the project as a whole, you make progress every day. Before you know it, you\u2019re typing the words \u201cThe End.\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            This is why production schedules help. They allow you to see, in black and white, how staying on track can get you to your goals. When you\u2019re feeling unmotivated and discouraged, look at your production schedule and see the date on the calendar for when you\u2019ll be finished, <\/span>if<\/span><\/i> you stay on track.<\/span><\/p>\n

            Once you know what your deadlines look like for each project that you\u2019ve picked out for the year, mark those big deadlines in your calendar. Break those big deadlines into smaller chunks if you can. <\/b><\/p>\n

            For instance, with this book, my goal was to write a chapter a day, regardless of the word count. Some days I wrote much more than that, but one chapter was my bare minimum. That was my daily deadline. If you\u2019re working on a larger project, such as a novel, you could have deadlines for the 10,000-word mark, the halfway mark, and so on. Mark each of those milestones on your calendar so that you know how on- or off-track you are as you move through the work.<\/span><\/p>\n

            If data and spreadsheets inspire you, as they do me, create some of those as well. Personally, I have a notebook that I use in which I\u2019ve written down dates and word counts like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

            November 1 (Sunday): 1,000 words<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

            November 2 (Monday): 1,000 words<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

            November 3 (Tuesday): 1,000 words<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

            Then, I cross out the word counts as I move forward. Sometimes, I\u2019ll work ahead. When that happens, I allow myself the flexibility of taking time off or giving myself leeway for when, undoubtedly, life gets in the way in the form of a sick child, a fried brain or a car breakdown.<\/span><\/p>\n

            Moreover, <\/span>if you\u2019re a freelancer or work in an industry that already drowns you in deadlines, you need to juggle<\/b> so you don\u2019t end up with four work deadlines and a novel deadline in the same week. The week you\u2019re traveling abroad for work is not the week to schedule the start of a new book project. Having a production calendar helps you keep daily word counts in sync with the rest of your life.<\/span><\/p>\n

            No matter how you eventually publish your work, you\u2019ll have to create room in your day for dealing with pesky publication issues as well: Edits, back cover copy, design, blogging, promotion, events and so on. While you may be able to continue your writing during those times \u2014 and you should! \u2014 sometimes it\u2019s impossible to fit everything into a single day. Allowing for that helps keep self-loathing at bay. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

            My favorite reason for having a production schedule is that it keeps me from getting hung up on or <\/span>too attached<\/span><\/a> to one single book or project. The day after I finished my first novel \u2014 a feat that took five full years \u2014 I began work on this book. <\/span><\/p>\n

            It was bad enough that my first one had taken that long, but I didn\u2019t want to spend the next three months obsessing about agents, publishers, and advances. While those things were important and got their time, I also wanted to move on to newer work so my self-esteem and career goals weren\u2019t tied up in a single book.<\/span><\/p>\n

            This is fairly common among writers, as you might already have noticed. They\u2019ll finish writing a book and then spend weeks, months, or years trying to get it published while writing nothing else in the meantime. <\/span>A production schedule or calendar allows you to have more work in the pipeline so that there\u2019s something else to focus on when you\u2019re finished with the current project.<\/b><\/p>\n

            Let me add, right away, that to the creative writer, \u201cproduction schedule\u201d seems like a very business-like, no-nonsense term that grates like fingernails on a chalkboard. Calling a book a \u201cproduct\u201d is like someone calling an article \u201ccontent.\u201d I don\u2019t like it.<\/span><\/p>\n

            Yet, I\u2019m a firm believer in looking at your work as art when you\u2019re in the process of creation and a business when you\u2019re looking at it from a career standpoint. In that sense, think of yourself as a publisher who has books to ship. By doing so, you have the best of both worlds: The creativity that comes from the art, and the money, sales and motivation that comes from a business.<\/span><\/p>\n

            Just because it\u2019s numbers doesn\u2019t mean it has to be dry. Find beautiful and artistic calendars for your walls that you can color in when you <\/span>meet your goal<\/span><\/a> for the day. Or, if you\u2019re like me and you enjoy crossing things out, buy a moleskine and cross out word targets as you go along. The more fun and entertaining you make it, the more likely you are to stick with it. Just remember to make it simple and not overly complicated.<\/span><\/p>\n

            Now you have a road map, a production schedule for a year, six months, or however long you\u2019ve planned ahead. A road map can tell you exactly what to work on and what lies ahead. It shows you that if you commit to the work every single day, you will have a finished project in your hands \u2014 or three \u2014 by the end of the year.<\/span><\/p>\n

            All you have to do is show up.<\/span><\/p>\n

            Have you used a production schedule? How did it help you meet your writing goals?<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            A little math can go a long way to help you finish your writing project \u2014 soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":7317,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[24,584,135],"class_list":["post-7288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft","tag-productivity-2","tag-start-writing-a-book","tag-writing-goals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritelife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}