Challenge Yourself to Set a Long Goal
31-Day Ninja Writer Challenge 2019: Day Eleven
I know that a lot of you are planning on giving NaNoWriMo a go this year. And some of you, if you finish your novel, want to self-publish it at least in part because it’s considerably faster than the molasses-slow traditional publishing process.
There’s this feeling sometimes that we have to slam out a novel and get it on Amazon as fast as humanly possible.
I want to make a case today for looking further into the future.
Here’s a quote from a great article written by author Hugh Howey:
My plan was to write two novels a year for ten years before I ascertained whether or not I had a chance of making this work. . . . If you set a long term plan like this, and stick with it, you will succeed. Because you’ll find yourself in the top 0.1% of aspiring writers. 99.9% of your colleagues will drop out before they finish their plan. But you’ll outwork them.
I love that.
What he’s saying here is that if you set a long game goal for yourself and stick with it, you’ll win simply by virtue of working harder than everyone else.
You’ll win, because you’re still there.
Notice that he didn’t say, “My plan was to spend ten years writing one novel perfectly.”
His plan was to write two novels a year for a decade, and then decide whether or not he might be successful. That’s twenty novels. Twenty novels is somewhere in the vicinity of 1.6 million words.
Guess what, Ninja. You can’t write twenty novels without getting better at it.
You can’t write about 1.6 million words without learning something about writing a novel.
Today, I’d like you to think about your long game goal. A ten year goal.
Think about things you can control.
You can’t control whether or not you’ll be a New York Times bestseller or whether or not a certain publisher will ever buy a book from you. Or if anyone will ever buy the movie rights.
You can control how many words you’ll write though. You can control what you put into learning your craft.
I like Hugh Howey’s goal. It’s aggressive, but I like the way it goes all in. And? If you get halfway there, you’ve done something major. Seriously, write a book every year for the next ten years and see what happens.
Just see what happens when you make a commitment to yourself to work your way to your goal — when you are one of the .01% that doesn’t drop out.
How cool would it be to start by writing a novel in 2019?
ASSIGNMENT ELEVEN:
Open to a new page in your notebook, title it “Long Game Goal,” and write down yours.
Come on over to Facebook and share it there, too. Because you know, a goal you make public is far more likely to happen.
You can check out all of the challenges in this series below.
Don’t forget to read and write for ten minutes each.
Read all of the challenges in this series here:
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Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the original Ninja Writer.