I’ll spare you the messy details, but it occurred to me recently that if I don’t make some changes to how I approach my writing, I’m never going to get the crappy first draft (and I say that with great affection) done. My writing has been like the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland. You don’t know whether or not you’ve won, let alone reached you’re desired destination. So you keep running until you tire yourself out and drop the project for not better reason than you don’t want to race about with it anymore. And that thought scares me. How can I become a better writer if I can’t even follow through with my stories?
Since figuring out that writing without concrete goals is the best way to guarantee that I wouldn’t be motivated to write, I happened to read Michelle Ward's recent guest post on Writer Unboxed. She wrote about working through obstacles by taking one step at a time and one of sections stood out to me: “…You might be overwhelmed with the scope of an idea.”
*raises hand* yep, that’s me. I’m ¾ of the way through and that’s still me.
In the body of the text was this handy-dandy link that went to her site and something Ward called the Goal Game. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I figured I’d play a round and see how it went.
It ended up looking like this:
And if for some reason I shouldn’t finish in this time period, hey, I’ll be that much closer to finishing. Either way, as long as I play the game, I’ll win.
So, dear reader, are you game?
