Writing, like many of the arts, requires diligence in the face of a complete lack of reward. I write this fully aware that no one is waiting with baited breath for my novel. A few of you have some interest in my blog overall (or you might be here just for this topic). The difficulty of writing is often in the motivation to keep going.
I happened to pick up a book at my local bookstore the other day: The 12 Week Year for Writers. It’s based on an original book, The 12 Week Year, and the premise is this: if you write down goals and break them down into increments to be accomplished over 12 weeks, you’re more likely to complete those goals– and therefore accomplish more in 12 weeks than most people do in an entire year. They even created a couple Google Doc organizer pages for you use over your 12 weeks.
I want to say before going any further that I am not being paid to recommend these books. I’m not even really recommending them. They seemed to go into more detail, but I didn’t pick up the actual books, just gleaned the concept and then adapted the Google Doc to fit my needs more specifically. I’m not not recommending them either– I just didn’t feel like getting them and had some other books I wanted to buy instead.
Step One: Create Goals
The first thing to do is to write out a list of specific goals. For my purposes, I decided that I wanted five kinds of goals as a writer:
- Regular Writing Goals, aka journaling, blogging, and writer groups that keep me writing regularly
- Finish a Project Goals, aka something I can say is finished and give me a sense of accomplishment
- A goal I call The Main, aka The Novel
- Make Money Goals, aka that I should be pitching, submitting, and querying
- Other Work Goals, aka the general sense of giving some love to other projects in varying states of completion
- Reading Goals, aka fulfilling the writer need to read
I decided to go ahead and do “kinds” of goals which can change as I reuse my form to keep me organized and not get overwhelmed. The original form only had space for three goals, but that seemed too limiting and didn’t have the sense of direction I knew I needed to give myself.
Step Two: Chart Preparation
The doc the 12 Weeks guys provide on their website has a useful chart that allows you to plan out the next 12 weeks of accomplishments. They call steps tactics (I’m not sure why) and have a scoring system inherent to the chart that I’m sure I’d learn about if I read the book. I didn’t so that, so I created my own as I adapated the chart.
Originally, the form left space for only two steps toward your goals. I expanded the goals list, so I expanded the steps per week as well.
I decided that the fourth goal would be a reading goal, and wouldn’t count toward the “grade” of the week.
I decided to adapt a concept from education in which students are graded as Failing, Adequate, Proficient, or Mastering:
- F = Failure, no goals were completed
- A = Adequate, one goal was completed
- S = Successful, two goals were comleted (Proficient didn’t feel right.)
- M = Mastery, three goals were completed
Step Three: Steps
It finally became time to break my goals down into steps.
I filled in the regular writing goals first. Twelve weeks is about three months. I try to journal once a month, but I didn’t put that in this time (I plan to next time though). My writing group meets every other week, so I filled that in. I wanted to complete no more than two blogs a week while catching up to a schedule in which I write blogs roughly a month before they are posted; I didn’t want to blog every week. I filled that in. I now had a few weeks with two blocks or no blocks taken an several with one.
I looked at the Dungeon Masters Guild project I had in the works at the time (Arcavios: A Heroic Chronicle for Strixhaven). I planned out from the first week what I would have to get done in a week (a chapter, revisions, publishing) to be ready to publish. That got first billing– even ahead of my novel. (Again, the point of these two goals are to keep writing and accomplishing so I almost trick myself into it.)
Then I add goals for my novel. Unlike the regular goals, which never end, and the Finish-A-Project, the novel does have an end– but I might not finish it within twelve weeks. I’m in revisions so I wanted to try to make sure I went back and revised a chapter a week, continuing my current schedule of doing it character by character (instead of straight through, as I wrote it). At this point, some of the weeks were filling up– but now I was scheduled to take a step a week toward completion of the real goal.
I went back through and started to fill in Make Money goals: sling my work to two places in a week. I decided I didn’t want to do it EVERY week (or I would have no space for the other goal).
Finally, I went through the remaining writing goal slots and put in a few ideas from my idea journal. The ideas that caught my attention, that I thought might be something some day.
(And then I plotted out a reading schedule which would allow me to keep to my reading goal of at least one book/play/graphic novel a month.)
Step Four: The Weekly Plan Set Up
The other form the 12 Weeks guys provided was the weekly plan template. This template has you write out your goals again, along with a writing schedule, and a word-count goal. It then is intended that you set up goals for each specific writing time.
I didn’t like that. I gave myself two writing goals and one reading goal a day. The reading goals were intended for me to finish about a chapter a day. No more than one blog a day. Work on the novel every day– which I made sure to do BEFORE the Finish-A-Project for this purpose, since I also wanted to work on it every day (but couldn’t if i also worked on the blog). Do other work on other days.
I set it so I would write every week day, but that Saturday and Sunday could be make-up days if I needed.
I leave to write on Wednesdays (waiting at a nearby coffee shop for my wife to get off work so we can go on our weekly date) and on one other day a week (because it’s good to get out of the house). I also write every other Monday for my writing group and in the evenings, usually after my wife goes to bed.
With that, my schedule was set up.
Success?
It is only week four while I’m writing this; this should be published around week nine. I’m not sure where I’ll be at that point, but I’m pretty optimistic from how well things have been going so far!
My first week I knocked it all out of the park. I finished all my goals, earning an M for the week (and an M “average” since it was week 1).
Second week I fell behind on my novel, but I finished two goals and hit word count. I earned an S for the week and gave myself an M for the word count goal.
Third week I again fell behind on novel, but caught up with the previous week’s goal. I didn’t hit word count though and went S for the week and S for the average.
But remember, even finishing two goals is an S, a success. And even as “behind” as I fell, I’ve finished more on the novel in a few weeks than I have in months– and some of that falling behind was because I needed to do some worldbuilding (mostly mapping).
I published the Strixhaven supplement early, caught up on my novel (to this week) and got my blogs done. With a couple more days left, I’m optimistic I can get an M for the week. If I can do that, and keep with the overall schedule, I won’t finish the novel’s second draft during this 12 week cycle– but I should during the next!
Thank you for reading and your support!
Do you use a system like this to organize your writing schedule? Would you like more posts like these? Let me know in the comments below– and please like, subscribe, and share if you found this interesting. If you like Dungeons and Dragons, you can support me by buying my work from the Dungeon Master’s Guild— and you can always support me by hitting the Support Me button at the top of the page.
Take care!
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