I often write about meeting writing goals: setting SMART goals, psychological tricks to make writing habits stick, and circumnavigating writer’s block. But one thing essential in reaching your goals is knowing clearly what they are. Do you know clearly what you should be working on right now?
One trick from the life-skills and coaching literature that often gets quoted is writing your own obituary or epitaph. Sounds a bit morbid I know, but the point is to make you think about what your true goals are. What are those can’t miss things you must do in this life so that looking back from your deathbed you have no regrets, What do you want your life to mean? What do you want your writing to mean? Do you want prizes, fame, or money (try to prioritize if you really can’t pick just one!). Are you more about being revered as a literary writer or finding commercial success? Getting distracted by the wrong goal can lead you not to achieve what’s truly important to you. Understanding what we want, and who we are, can help us climb the right mountains.
So I want to suggest something I did recently, which is like writing your own obituary, but maybe not quite so bleak. It’s writing an aspirational bio.
What do I mean?
We’ve all written actual writer’s bios. You can read my current one under the tab on this website that reads ‘Bio” (unsurprisingly enough). I have to have one as almost every time I submit a short story, and certainly, when they get accepted or published, they ask you for your writer’s bio to put alongside your story. So it made me think, in 5 years or so, what would I like that bio to say?
Do I want it to talk about “over 200 short stories published”, or is it more important to me to instead of a large number, have a list of particularly prestigious markets that my work has appeared in? Or should it be emphasizing a novel?
It’s not that this navel-gazing gets any of those things done, but what it does do, is point out to me where I’m getting distracted. Last year I published three times as many short stories as I did this year. But that was partly a result of choices – this year I chose to focus on longer pieces and harder to get into markets. It was the right decision for me as, while I may not have published as much, what I have published better represents what I want to put out in the world as my writing. Doing the aspirational bio also pointed out there were publications on that ‘one-day’ list that I have never even submitted something to as I consistently write the type of story/genre that they don’t publish. Well, if that’s something I want, then I need to change what I’m writing. So for me, this has been an incredibly helpful exercise.
My only caveat is, don’t spend too long on it – it’s easy to daydream instead of doing the actual writing 🙂
How do you choose what to focus on, or where to put your writing time and energy? Let me know in the comments!
Gideon P. Smith 
I haven’t figured out exactly what keeps me from writing as much as I want. Certainly there are those old chestnuts: “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” and “If it’s important enough, you’ll find a way.” While that may be true, there are other factors besides sheer will of force that keep us from writing. Illness is one. An overloaded work schedule is another. Exhaustion from lack of sleep is a third. I know what I want from my writing. But there’s still this large gap between what I want and the price I’m willing to pay to get there.
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