It looks like I’m not the only writer I know who has been setting and resetting writing goals, lately. Two veteran contributors to The Centrifugal Eye poetry journal — TCE staff writer Karla Linn Merrifield, and author Laury A. Egan — make up this Feature Friday’s Guest Event. They’ve “stopped by” at Hanninen Freelance Editing to share a few words and thoughts about goal-setting with you readers.
Thank you, Karla and Laury!
"Hamster Wheel" WIX Stock Photo
Scribble, scribble, toil and trouble
By Karla Linn Merrifield
Trouble, you say? The very trouble William Wordsworth identified: “The world is too much with us; late and soon. / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers /.”
Sound familiar? I doubt I’m alone in suffering from a brain in constant spin — whirling in non-stop run-on sentences à la news internet email shopping nap more news more email Netflix binge email tv rerun doze more news. . . . Anxiety! Insomnia! Oh my! This had to stop! Time to dive deep down inside to deep mind, and summon my wiser alter ego: O, powerful Fairy Godmother of Writers, help me unplug my treadmill head!
Fairy G wagged an inky finger and told me sternly: You’ve lost track of your goals, dear writer. Too often RE-acting instead of PRO-acting. (More finger wagging.) Rushing hither and yon to meet submission deadlines, rushing through thousands of images in search of book-cover art, finalizing one ms., revising another, making new poems — with your run-on intrusions set on auto-loop! You’re doing the willy-nilly dance, and that’s not style. Until now.
As instructed, I dipped into the medicine pouch she carries under her left alular wing-feathers and sprinkled Fairy G Imagination dust over my shoulders, wishing to shut down hamster-wheel cerebellum and retrieve the lay-wasted power to set Imagination goals. I’d done it before, fingers crossed, I could do it again. Just as our editor, Eve Hanninen, has been doing it — reframing her goals. Thus, for example, she reset the weekly blogging schedule — it’s now a fortnightly goal. She has purposefully carved out more time to focus on her own creative endeavors. What a role model!
A dilly, a dally, an oh, so mellow dawdle
Wish I could say I followed up immediately, but I resisted Fairy G’s marching orders for a spell as the first dose of dust lost its efficacy. Poof, gone. Back in the rut, I was. Worse! Dallying. Tempted to make a year-long project of Imagination goal-setting. What’s the rush? People do, you know, procrastinate, warned Fairy G, but I wanted to procrastinate. Royally. Be among the aristocracy of literary procrastinators who obsessively dither in the labyrinths of tangential research. With nary a goal in mind, I could see the attraction of reading, say, Ryan Holiday’s list* of “24 Books to Hone Your Strategic Mind,” published in Thought Catalog a few years ago. Ryan nicely provides a reasonable reason — no mere excuse — to go down that rabbit hole:
Strategy is something that is critically relevant to all of us — not just those with
careers in the military. We all have goals, we all have obstacles to those goals and
we all live in a world we do not control. Those things combine to create the
necessity of strategy. The better we are at it — the better we are at doing what we
want and need to do.
Strategy is important. Got it. Been thus since the 6th-century BCE when Sun Tzu, father of western military metaphors, spelled out the necessity of strategy in his The Art of War (on above list).
Lesson relearned; thank you, Fairy G. Tzu, et al., can wait, as can YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo. I shall ration my news intake. Unclutter my days for Imagination.
I’m gonna write that trouble right out of my hair
A month ago, I took a second pinch of Fairy G’s Imagination dust and, lo, I was ready to set a few goals. How? The methods of goal-setting are myriad. What’s my style? What’s yours?
Some methods, IMO, are too ornate. Fussy. BuJo, for example, short for Bullet Journaling. Quite the “Big Thing” now, I’ve gathered. Learn more.
I much prefer productivity guru Zdravko Cvijetic’s approach: Simplicity.
Goal-setting newbies might benefit from Cvijetic’s productivity cheat sheet. I did.
I also felt Dariou Faroux’s short riff on productivity worth a quick read.
Follow every writing rainbow
I picked up my personal method during a month-long, online retreat* I took last summer with Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy at Two Sylvias Press. Their final prompt of dozens? Goal-setting!
I rediscovered what works for me. After a three-month hiatus, I returned to it. I’m back on track. Can even scratch two goals off my annual list. Done. Done. The exercise made me realize, I’ve neglected my free-writing.
What are your priorities? The template is simple: 2 lists. Think of the following as prompts for your own lists.
List 1: Goals for the Month –
New Work, Free-Writing, Journaling, Submissions, Freelance, Enrichment
~New poems: 12; include 1 political poem + 2 R poems + 2-3 in Lovers ms. in forms not
yet “used”
~15 min. freewriting
~Journal 10 mins. EVERY day min.
~Book journal = 3 entries
~Organize + do month’s subs = ??
~Finish G’s poetry book w/ edit notes
~Read daily: Miriam Sagan’s Miriam’s Well: Poetry, Land Art, and Beyond*
List 2: Goals for the Year (next July 21)
~Go on a voyage + write 1 poem/day (7)
~Keep up monthly sub. routine
~Rev. Gizmo Girl’s Diary = ready to submit
~Complete draft of Lovers (7 poems + TOC, etc.)
~Make 3 public appearances min.
~Outline new poetry ms.
Listen to “The Impossible Dream”.
Listen to this.
*Highly recommended by Fairy G. I concur.
SIDEBAR:
Writing impossible dreams to reach unreachable stars
By Karla Linn Merrifield,
with Laury A. Egan
The following are a few further reflections on goal-setting from Laury A. Egan, author of The Outcast Oracle. She is one of the most disciplined writers I know (and a fine arts photographer, to boot). Our email exchange enriched my thinking about the topic at hand. Hers is a big-picture view:
Goal-setting . . . hmm . . .That’s such an individual situation, with different people
handling their goals in so many diverse ways. When I see, for example, writing
prompts on Facebook, etc., to the effect that the writer should write 3,000 words a
day (or more), I worry about the thrust of this encouragement. While it’s fine to
discipline oneself to sitting down each day to work, placing a word count seems
superficial and rewarding quantity rather than quality. So, goal-setting of this nature
is a concern.
A wise caveat emptor, IMO. Fairy G concurs.
Laury went on to write about the readiness needed prior to goal-setting.
“I’m looking at this from a creative and inventive perspective, but both of these
elements would also apply to the guy who wants to be a millionaire by age 20”:
What makes you need to set a goal?
PASSION — Could be passion for financial gain; fame; accomplishment or
achievement; proving self as valuable (especially to someone like a parent who has
denigrated the person in the past); the drive to create something new (invention); to be
a trailblazer, i.e., the first; to overcome past failures; to communicate ideas or world
experience that is intrinsic to that individual; to change society through what is created.
BELIEF—The individual must believe that his/her goal is reachable, even if it appears
to others as being an “the impossible dream,” as per the lyrics in Man of La Mancha.
(The dream may not be realistic, however, even if the person thinks it is.) The belief in
the goal is fueled by passion and need — no one sets a goal without these two
ingredients. The more powerful the ambition, need, and passion, the higher the octane.
Then the individual must calculate the steps necessary to achieve the goal. The more
refined the calculations, the more incremental, the more likely the goal can be achieved,
even if the height of the achievement must eventually be modified or lowered because of
reality and worldly constraints.
Damn fine advice. Fairy G concurs.
For more from Karla Linn Merrifield, visit her blog, Vagabond Poet Redux.
For more from Laury A. Egan, visit her website,