Falling Short On Your Freelance Resolutions? Try, Try Again . . .

If you want to run a marathon, you have to work up to the kind of physical and mental conditioning that makes running that 26 miles possible.

I don’t run marathons (yet anyway), but I have trained for a 10-mile walk for the past two years. And what I’ve learned is that consistency matters more than mileage on most days. In other words, I might be able to walk 10 miles on one Saturday. But there is more of a long-term training benefit if I get up every morning before work and walk or run for three miles. Because over the long haul, it’s the habit of walking or working out that gets me to where I want to go—not the fact that I can do the occasional 5- or 10-mile walk.

Some might disagree with me, but I think the same lessons apply when it comes to writing. My guess is that it’s very difficult to write a novel if you’re not writing with any kind of disciplined regularity. If you’re writing 1,500 words a day, it’ll be much easier for you to write a 300-page novel than it will be for the  writer who only writes when he or she is “in the mood.”

I’m sure that quite a few of you are familiar with NanoWriMo (and if you aren’t, I’d encourage you to read more about it here). One of the many benefits of participating is that you learn that daily and weekly word count goals really do matter. What matters least is the quality of what comes out the first time—it’s all about getting a draft down on paper. Once you have the draft, you can go back and brush up from there.

So why am I bringing all this up? Well, at the start of the year, I talked about the importance of setting freelance goals or New Year’s resolutions. And whether I stated it publicly or not at the time, I’ll tell you now that one of my freelance goals was to do just what I’m talking about here: write a certain number of words every day or week. And while I am hitting that word count by writing these blog posts, my original goal was to work on a book that I’ve had knocking around in my head for the past couple of years.

I’d really love to tell you that I’ve adhered to my goal since setting that resolution. But I’d be lying if I told you that. I have had a lot of other things going on since I set that freelance goal, but that’s life, is it not? Life is always going to be busy, and there will always be other things competing for my attention. So no more excuses.

But instead of beating myself up for not maintaining my word count resolution, I’ve decided to recommit to that original goal. And if you’d like to join me, take a look at some of the resolutions that you set for yourself a month or so ago. Have you kept all of them? If not, why not? I think the important thing when you fail to hit a goal is to not focus overly much on the failure, but instead, to find the lesson and use it as a guide to success the next time.

So that’s my plan of action. Here’s what I learned, and here’s what I’m going to do differently this time:

1) Practice consistency. When my workload picked up and I needed to wrap up some freelance assignments, I pushed my own daily word count goal aside because I felt like I didn’t have time. Also, working on my own book hasn’t yet resulted in any kind of cash flow. And realistically, there were many days in the last month or so when writing 1,500 words a day would have seemed like a superhuman feat with everything else I was juggling. But instead of scaling back and telling myself it was okay to just write 300 or 500 words, there were many days when I simply didn’t write anything at all toward my goal. This time, I will write something every day toward that goal—even if it’s just a paragraph. Because it’s the consistency that counts over the long haul. Three hundred words a day for a month would still give me 9,000 words at the end of 30 days. And that’s a lot more than I have now.

2) Get into a routine. When I get up for work in the morning, I have a certain routine. The advantage of having this routine is that I don’t have to expend a lot of brainpower when I’m still groggy in the morning. When the alarm goes off, I just know that I have to do certain things. So the the beauty of having a routine is that I do important things without question or much thought. One of the mistakes I made in setting that word count goal for myself at the beginning of the year is that I did not stick to the same routine every day. Instead of getting up every morning and writing at the same time every day, there were a number of days when I told myself that XYZ was more important and that I’d get to my writing project later. The only problem with that approach was that on some days, “later” never came. Right now, I get up and work out every morning. So before I go work out, I’m going to start writing at least 300 words while I drink that first cup of coffee.

3)  Focus on forward motion, not perfection. I don’t know about you, but as many times as I tell myself the first draft doesn’t matter, it does. I still want my writing to be worthy for public consumption the second my words hit the page. But that’s just not realistic. So instead of waiting until I’m not as tired or [insert excuse or adjective here], I plan to focus more on action than perfection this time around. Even if what I write never goes anywhere, I think it’s the act of writing consistently over a period of time—that forward motion—that really matters in the long run. And eventually, I’ll be able to say that I’ve actually written a novel.

As Artistotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

So how are you doing on your freelance goals for the year? Are you keeping up with them? If not, how have you or do you plan on getting back on track?

Photo credit: .hln. (Flickr)