One Simple Trick for Setting Author Goals

When you’re an aspiring author, your success depends a lot on luck.

You could write a fantastic story and still struggle to get it published. Maybe your story doesn’t fit current market trends. Or maybe an agent or editor loves your story…but happened to acquire a similar one last week.

Even when you know it’s not always about you, it can be really discouraging to feel like you’re not meeting your goals.A few years ago, I decided to try a really simple trick: I split my author goals into ones that depend on luck and ones that don’t.

And honestly, I think that one small change really jump-started my writing career.

For example, these were a few goals on my list of “goals that depend on luck”:

• Sell a short story to a pro-rate magazine
• Sign with a literary agent
• Speak at an event about one of my stories
• Win a writing award

These are the big, shiny goals that are visible to the public, the types of goals that I add to my author bio once I achieve them.

But they’re not the goals I’m actually thinking about when I decide how to spend my writing time.

Instead, I’m working towards goals on my other list—goals that are much more under my own control. Here are a few examples:

• Attend at least one writing conference this year
• Finish the first draft of my second novel by September
• Read at least 1 writing craft article a month
• Collect 100 rejection letters from magazines this year

These types of goals often go unnoticed and uncelebrated. Nobody will ever give me a gold star for collecting 100 rejection letters. (More likely, they’ll look at me like I’m a masochistic fool.)

But these are the goals that are under my control more than they’re under anyone else’s. It still takes some degree of luck and privilege to achieve them—I wouldn’t be able to work on them if I weren’t relatively healthy and financially stable—but at the end of the day, I’m only competing against myself.

Splitting my goals up this way really helps me keep myself accountable for the things that I can control and let myself off the hook for things I can’t. It let me dream big without blaming myself for falling short.

What are your writing goals, and how do you like to categorize them? Let me know in the comments.