IWSG: Writing Goals

 

            Time for another posting with the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, where writers can share their insecurities and encourage one another. IWSG was founded by Alex J. Cavanaugh and we share our posts the first Wednesday of the month. The IWSG poses a question for us to answer in our monthly posts. Here is the question for December:

In terms of your writing career, where do you see yourself five years from now, and what’s your plan to get there?

            This has just been a week of future-oriented questions. First, the Question of the Month was about retirement, and now this. Maybe this is God’s way of telling me to start thinking more about the future in my life. I must admit that this is a tough question to answer because I have not set many definitive goals with my writing. I’ve allowed stress and many distractions to get in the way of my search for writing contests and publications to submit to. The book that I started sometime in the last year has been put on hold because it was loosely based on some of my own experiences and I’m not ready to write a character that is too much like myself. So, those are the things I’m not doing, but what am I doing? What are my writing plans? These are questions that really get me thinking and I actually have been thinking about these things a lot more the last few months than I was previously.

            Five years from now, I hope to be a lot more writing-oriented, and in order to get to that point, I will need to make some changes with my current job situation. I hope to turn one of the ideas floating around in my head into a novel and I want to participate in NaNoWriMo at least once in the next five years. In the meantime, I have decided that I really enjoy writing short stories after the two anthology entries I’ve written. My entry from last year was mostly an experiment and I’m not sure I like it anymore, but I plan to steal one of the characters from that story and give him his own new story. In fact, I may introduce him in a blog post in the next couple months. As for this year’s entry, my brain has already created a prequel and multiple character continuations of the story I wrote and these ideas could have novel potential. Although, the idea of writing a fantasy novel is quite intimidating. I also hope to have at least one thing published somewhere; an article, a story, or even a book. I know in order to get something published I need to write more and submit more, which would mean scheduling my writing time better. These goals may not seem very big to those who are career writers, but for me these sound doable under my current circumstances. I’m a slow writer, so each step I take with my writing feels like a big step for me! If some other life circumstances change, I may be able to shift to writing on a more full-time basis and then I would have a whole new set of goals to share.

 

Do you like to keep your goals small or do you think big? Any other slow writers out there?