June is for losers
Lessons from my May goalsetting efforts
Last month, I wrote a post setting an editing goal for myself, in a piece I boldly and hopefully titled: “May is for winners.”
May is for winners: set a goal with me!
Every spring, there comes a day when I go for a walk in the woods behind my house and I realize I am nearly euphoric with happiness and hope and lightness and creativity. (Mhmm, yes, like a lady walking around in the second half of a commercial for an SSRI medication.) This year, the experience fell this past Monday, as I tromped the trails with Baby Go…
In that post, I aspired to edit 10 pages a day, which would have taken me from page 54 in my manuscript to page 254, and on-track to finish editing by the end of June.
So, what page did I end the month on?
104!
Fifty pages done, A MERE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PAGES SHY OF MY GOAL!
Hence the title of my post, which I don’t really mean, of course. Anyone who’s undertaken the mindgame of revising a crime novel knows that any amount of revision is a win. (Or so I tell myself.) And falling short of the goal didn’t come as much of a surprise after my very first day of the endeavor, hence my “uh oh” recorded on May 2nd when I saw that I managed to edit two pages that morning before work, not ten.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t feel some disappointment at times during the month, especially when I got bogged down in a plot issue that I couldn’t untangle without doing some serious inventory of the current manuscript. That’s the three days I marked as “outlining” at the end of the month, because that was more succinct than “re-read the whole book and distill pertinent info into color-coded post its to put on the Charlie-Day-meets-serial-killer wall in my office.”
How necessary was my outlining freak out? Time will tell, but I got back to writing the following week (aka this week), and I feel more relaxed and like I know where I’m going again.
So here I sit, comparing my May aspirations to my May realities and confronting the constraints of my time and energy. I am in the classic conundrum: I want the book to be as good as it can be, as fast as it can be. Write fast or write well? I cannot seem to do both. It’s the good-cheap-fast riddle, and maybe all three apply here—maybe a novel can be good and fast, and the price is your mental energy, which I just don’t have to offer up to the book at maximum capacity.
As for June, I’m not setting any specific goals, but I am going to keep tracking my pages so I can watch them tick by. I’d like to crank things one notch in the fast direction, but I’m sure I’m in for a seesaw summer as I go back and forth on what I think I should do.
What else did I do in May, you ask? Well, I read a few books, including Andromeda’s upcoming What Boys Learn. It is LEGIT SO GOOD, I can’t wait for you all to get your fingies on it!! But I mostly read craft books, which I tend to find supportive and motivating when I could use a little oomph. And I did most of the things on the list I put at the bottom of the May post—I took a couple baths and more than a couple walks, did a lil exercise, had some ice creams, saw friends every week, and spent a lot of time with Ben and the girls.
I didn’t meet my goal, but when I look back at the month, I can’t say it wasn’t a win.
Does good-fast-cheap apply to novel writing? Does “cheap” equate to mental energy, or something else? Writers: how do you solve the equation?
It's interesting seeing your slower-than-expected-but-still-forward-moving progress and thinking, "I'd take that over my complete non-progress!" Which provides some perspective during those times we want to criticize ourselves for being slow. SLOW IS BETTER THAN STOPPED.
I completely failed on the May goals I posted. The project I thought I'd be working on came to a complete halt in May due to competing writing/teaching/travel/book promotion obligations. Meanwhile, a new and shinier project has been taking over my daydreaming time. I...MUST...GET...BACK...TO...THE...THING..I..PROMISED...TO...FINISH.
RELATABLE! I'm always setting goals and wildly overestimating how much I can actually accomplish in a given timeframe. I hit a similar-ish speedbump in May. I set the goal to rewrite most (if not all) of my WIP's second act. I soon realized that I was kind of lost in the plot and moving forward without a plan was probably only going to confuse me more.
So instead, I jumped on the #1000wordsofsummer train and started writing a different book that's been rattling around in my head for a while lol
I'm terribly impatient, so I feel you on the "I want this to be good and be done fast" front. This new thing I'm working on has so much energy, and I feel like I'm flying through my writing sessions. I love the forward momentum, but I also know that it takes me a few passes to feel a story is actually good, and that part is never fast for me.