Deciding on a Challenge
Setting Writing Goals for the New Year…
I have noticed this year that I seem to be very shell-shocked, for lack of a better way of putting it, when it comes to setting a goal for 2025. Never remember having this issue before.
I am not afraid of failing with a challenge. I always fail to success with every challenge, and failing is a part of publishing. Just nature of the beast. So no worry there when setting a goal.
But these last two years have been brutal in life events for me. First I lost vision and only regained a part of it, then I smashed up my shoulder and had that surgery and long recovery, then we discovered issues in WMG and are still in the process of cleaning those up. Two very long years with almost no real writing for me, even though I managed some words during this last year.
So now I face a new year, a normal time for me to restart and set a new challenge. So if I am not afraid of failing, what is the problem?
Time.
I have done so many challengers over the years, and never repeat a challenge I have accomplished, so that now anything I come up with is pretty extreme in nature. And in the amount of time I need to spend each day to make it happen. So the shell-shocked aspect of this comes in when I am looking at the time I would need and wondering if the world is ready to give me that time.
Or better put, if I can rip that amount of time away from the world and the life events.
I think I can most days. But even more important, I don’t think I can spend any more time having the world control my time and my writing.
I have a hunch I am not the only one dealing with this reluctance to dive back into writing after major life events.
So over this next week, I hope to lead here by example and just take the plunge with a new challenge for 2025. I am still thinking between three possible ones, all challenges I have not accomplished before. Two I have actually failed to success at in the past.
And all will really, really challenge me and the battle to take back my writing time from all the life events. Stay tuned.
15 Comments
Harvey Stanbrough
Excellent, Dean. You’ll figure it out.
2024 was my best year of fiction and consumable (fiction + nonfiction blog) to date. I’ll have over 850,000 words of published fiction (including 19 novels) before December 31, and I’ve already surpassed 1,000,000 consumable words with (currently) 1,171,505.
For 2025 my annual goal is 3100 words of fiction per day and 22 novels. Plus I’m writing a short story every week for the Bradbury Challenge I’m running at the Journal. Writing fiction is my escape from the inevitable issues that come with getting older.
Hang in there. I owe mine to you, like you owe yours to the giants who preceded you.
dwsmith
Fantastic!!! Harvey, you are totally amazing. 19 novels. Beats my record back in traditional publishing of 13 in one year. So very cool!!!
Keep firing.
Harvey Stanbrough
The secret, for me, has been releasing a novel every two weeks for prepublication sale. When a novel wraps, I put it up for release two weeks out, then use that release date for the “deadline” for the next novel. Every day I hate to stop writing, and every evening I can only barely wait to get back to the story or a new novel the next day.
There’s nothing better or more fun than recording the characters’ story as I and the characters run through it and it unfolds all around us. Give your characters free rein, folks, to tell the story that they, not you, are living.
dwsmith
Totally agree, Harvey!
Vincent Zandri
I completely understand your dilemma if you want to call it that. Back in May when I was diagnosed with lymphoma my principle worry wasn’t if I was going to live or die, it was how is treatment plus hordes of tests, doctor visits, plus lung surgery going to get in the way of my word count and my livelihood (no disability for fulltime writers). But then I thought, I travel all the time with my laptop and write in some strange places. Why should this be different? That’s what I did and now all these months later and only two treatments left to go, I haven’t skipped a beat. I’m even back to cross training two hours per day. Mind over matter Dean!
dwsmith
Fantastic, Vincent. Just fantastic and a great light for the rest of us. Thanks!!
Mark Kuhn
Without any explanation (after all I’ve been through in the last three years?) my interest in writing fiction has flipped to writing non fiction. Go figure, huh?
Brad d. Sibbersen
Maybe a challenge unrelated to the sheer quantity of output? Writing in a genre you haven’t written in before (probably will be difficult for you as well!), or in a format you haven’t tackled yet. Or a weird approach (“I shall write this epic science fiction decology entirely in second person!”). A character type you generally detest, and the challenge is to make them relateable/likeable/less stereotypical/whatever. The same story from two radically different points of view, published together in the same book. A children’s book. A comic book series. Something else utilizing pictures to help tell the story. Best thing about challenges is that even the sky’s not the limit!
dwsmith
Thanks, but way too much critical voice to start projects like that for me. I have no idea what I am going to write until I am finished, for the most part.
Harold Goodman
What do you mean when you write the phrase:
fail to success
dwsmith
I will explain it in full tonight.
Jason M
2025 challenge ideas:
1) Start a new series in every major genre. One book a piece.
2) Write a group of 26 short stories whose protagonists’ names go in alphabetical order.
3) Pick a setting/genre you absolutely have no interest in and force yourself to do 4 novellas in that world. See if the love comes (as they say about arranged marriages).
dwsmith
Thanks… fun ideas but I don’t come at stories that way. I have no idea what I am going to write until basically I am done.
Steve Lewis
Dean, what if you combined challenges?
Like say you did a writing challenge combined with a publishing challenge,
As an example: Set a goal for a certain number of new novels. then put the new novel together with a backlist novel like an old school Ace Double. Maybe there’s a theme that connects the two even thought they aren’t in the same series or they contrast each other.
Just spitballing, but I think, at this point, you’ve done so many challenges, combining multiples might be the only way to do it.
dwsmith
Publishing has other people involved in it. However, even with my bad eyes, I am working back to laying out Smith’s Monthly, so there is something there when I restart that. I do 95% if the work on that. It is a two-column format with a lot of ads so it has to be done in InDesign. I find it fun, to be honest.
Thanks!!