These past few posts, we’ve been talking about making writing resolutions and putting them into action.  As we start the new year, I thought I’d add one last post on this topic, only this time with words of wisdom I’ve collected over the years from various creative people.  We can make big plans and dream up fabulous scenarios but ultimately, we have to come to terms with the fact that sooner or later we will fail at our resolutions.

This is probably not what you want to hear and it’s certainly not something I want to say, but the truth is that as soon as we set a goal, we are opening up ourselves to the possibility that we might fail.  After all, if our goals were so easy that failure was impossible, then they’re rather wimpy goals, aren’t they?

If failure is so inevitable, how do we keep ourselves from giving up?

Focus on bouncing back.

The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.
~Randy Nelson (Pixar executive)

According to an interview with top Pixar executive, Randy Nelson, when looking for new innovators to join the Pixar team, he doesn’t so much look at whether an individual has failed at something in the past.  Rather, he explains that what he cares about is how that person bounces back.

This, of course, makes perfect sense.  After all, everyone makes mistakes now and again and if we spend our whole lives avoiding failure we’ll end never taking worthy risks or trying anything challenging.  Next time you make a mistake or slip up on something, don’t waste precious energy worrying about what’s already happened.  Focus on what you can do moving forward to fix the problem.

You are NOT your project.

Don’t say “I failed.”  Say “this failed” and move on.

Someone (I can’t remember who it was) said this to me in passing and while I can’t remember whose words these were, the words themselves have made a lasting impression on me. In fact, I jot this quote down on the inside cover every time I start a new writing notebook so that it’s the first thing I see every time I start writing.

Remember: just because something didn’t work out the way you wanted doesn’t mean that you have failed.  Maybe that project just wasn’t meant to be.  Or maybe you need to approach it in a different way.  But none of these things make you a failure.  You are not your work.  Once you’ve gotten comfortable setting that boundary, you’ll be able to face just about any hurdle.

Make it better.

Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.
~Samuel Beckett

My very first design teacher used to say “Make it better” to every design we brought in for critique.  This didn’t mean that the design was bad–in fact, many of the students in the class presented projects that were quite creative and well-executed.  The teacher’s point was that no matter how good your design, you can always try to find a way to make it even better.

The same is true in writing (or any creative endeavor, actually).  You try, you fail.  Then you try again and you might fail again but that time you’re closer to getting it right.  In the words of Beckett, you “fail better.”

Whatever direction you choose to go, you’re always going somewhere.

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
~Yogi Berra

Sounds like a silly quote, right?  In fact, many people quote Yogi Berra for humorous effects but the truth is that some of the things he said actually made a lot of sense.  For instance, it might seem obvious that if you come to a fork in the road you should take it, but the beauty of this statement is in its simplicity.

Sometimes you have to make a tough decision (choosing which road to take) and a lot of people get stuck making that choice because they’re scared.  What are they scared of, you ask?  Failure.  I’d be willing to bet that every person who stalls in a decision is doing so because he or she is afraid of making the wrong choice.

But what if you just assume that there is no right and wrong?  What if you just choose and deal with the challenges that pop up when they appear?  Every decision you make propels you forward toward something.  The trick is adjusting your trajectory when you realize your current route isn’t taking you toward your goal.

Imagine the impossible…

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
~Lewis Carroll

…and figure out how to make it possible.

My dear friend, clear your mind of can’t.
~Samuel Johnson

I once attended a panel discussion about science fiction and how television executives, writers and movie directors envisioned all those gadgets and technology of the future.  One of the panelists said something along these lines: “it’s easy, you just take technology we have now and move it ahead 20 or 30 years.”  If you think about it, all those great sci-fi movies and TV shows of the twentieth century did just that.  Look at all those classic James Bond spy toys or the communicators they used in Star Trek… they work a lot like smart phones or other modern-day gizmos, don’t they?  The point is, sometimes you have to imagine the impossible (and what’s more impossible to imagine than something that hasn’t happened yet).  Of course, imagining the impossible will only be useful if you also think of ways to make the impossible possible.  Don’t say “I can’t,” say “how can I?” and do it.

These quotes have helped me deal with failure and challenges in my own work and I hope they will inspire you as well.  Sometimes all it takes is a little fire beneath one’s backside to help a writer go from “I don’t think I can…” to “Bring it on!”

So go ahead and show the world you’re a literary bad@$$.

After all this talk about making resolutions stick and reaching your goals, I thought it might be fun to find out what everyone’s goals are for 2012.  For me my writing resolutions are pretty simple:

•  Keep working to make DIY MFA awesome.  I want to keep adding cool new features to this project and offering innovative new products and services.  I have tons of ideas for the new year and can’t wait to share them all with you when the time comes!

•  Go back to writing fiction.  Once upon a time, before DIY MFA took over all my writing, I used to write middle grade and teen fiction.  While DIY MFA will continue to be my focus, this year I would like to spend a little time going back to my fiction, even if it’s just for fun.

•  Have a baby!  Yep, that’s right.  In a few short weeks, my life is going to be turned upside-down by a new little person.  The little guy is due to arrive sometime in mid-late January so right now I’m working hard to get DIY MFA in order before that happens.  Don’t worry – DIY MFA will still continue, I may just have to slow down for a few weeks while I adjust to mom-hood.  I’m very excited but also a tiny bit terrified about this big new adjustment.  If any of you are parents, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean.

What does this mean for DIY MFA?  My hope is to have posts and tweets scheduled so that most people won’t even notice I’ve been away, but for you loyal readers who know better, I would like to enlist your help.  I’m scheduling my posts and tweets ahead of time and I would be enormously grateful for any retweets or mentions you guys could lend during the time that I’m in the midst of baby-mayhem.  Any social media support you can give in the month of January (especially between Jan. 16 and Jan. 30) would be unbelievably awesome!

Thank you all for your continued support of DIY MFA.  I feel so lucky to have such wonderful and talented writers surrounding me and my wish for you is that your 2012 is as exciting and filled with joy as I know mine will be.

Happy New Year!

Earlier this week, we talked about setting goals and making writing resolutions that stick. What we didn’t discuss was how to turn those resolutions into reality once you’ve made them.  That’s the topic today.

When it comes to actually reaching our goals, we have to remember one thing: no matter how far we have to go or how huge the climb will be, we’ll only make it if we take things one step at a time.  But sometimes it’s hard to know if the step we’re taking is actually getting us to our goal or if it’s taking us… nowhere.  That’s where the technique in this post comes in.  I learned this method reading Wishcraft by Barbara Sher and have adapted it to fit my own style.  The technique is simple: just follow these three easy steps.

Step 1:  Start at your goal and work your way backwards.  When you start at the beginning, it can be difficult to figure out what next step to take to get you to your goal.  If you start at the goal, on the other hand, you may not know what the first step would be, but you can certainly infer what the next-to-last step is.

Example: If your goal is to find an agent for your book, your last step would be signing with the agent, right?  By that logic, it stands to reason that right before you sign with the agent, you would have to submit a full draft of your book to said agent so he or she can decide whether to sign you.  Before that, you probably would have to send a query with a partial set of pages.  Before that, you’d have to research which agents to query and keep track of what you sent to each one. And so it goes.  Continue working backwards until you get to the point where you are right now.  Voila!  By working backwards, you suddenly have all the major steps leading up to your goal laid out for you.

Step 2:  Plot the major landmarks between where you are now and your goal.  Essentially you just did that in step one, but I like to take this second step to plot out those major landmarks on my journey in the forward-order, rather than backwards (like in Step 1).  Think of this step as plotting out a road trip, where you figure out all the cities and landmarks you want to hit between your starting point and your destination.  You’re not worried yet about the minutia of each individual leg of the journey; you’re just figuring out the main trajectory.

Step 3: Reduce each section between landmarks to the smallest possible piece.  This is when you look at the individual legs of the trip and figure out the details.  Where will you stay for the night?  Where will you stop for gas?  How many miles will you drive per day?  It’s the same with writing.

If your goal is to finish your novel in 100 days and you think you need about 100K words, just break it down to small, manageable chunks, like 1k words per day (that’s 4-5 pages double spaced… totally doable).  If your goal is to research 30 agents by the end of the month, research one agent per day and you’re set.  The idea here is to break down those larger steps into smaller ones so that each step is more manageable.

Take-Home Message: In the end, if you take each step toward your goal one at a time you’re much more likely to reach your goal.  Why?  Because big goals are scary and intimidating but baby steps are just that: baby steps.  And babies are cute and cuddly, so baby steps can’t be all that scary, right?

When life gets overwhelming, it’s important to focus on just one thing in the moment.  Sure, multitasking might seem more efficient because it feels like you’re getting things done, but if tackling multiple things at once makes you buckle under the pressure, then you’re not really being all that efficient now, are you?  Better to choose just one small thing, do it and check it off your list.  Then, if you have time, you can do the next small thing… and the next.  Before you know it, you’ll be miles closer to your goal.

TODAY: choose one small step you can take toward your goal and do it right now.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a hard time with New Years Resolutions.  I make these loooong lists of things I plan to do–often biting off WAY more than I can chew–and by February, the resolutions are nothing more than a faint memory.

Lately, though, I’ve found a few ways of making New Years Resolutions less of a wash and making them useful to me.  After all, what’s the point of making these resolutions if one month later I’m going to break them all anyway?  Here are some tips that have helped me set goals and stick to them (particularly as applies to my writing).  Not surprisingly, these are all concepts that go hand-in-hand with core elements of DIY MFA.

1) Figure out where you are.
Where are you starting from? Think of this as that big red dot on the map and the arrow pointing to it that says: “You Are Here.” Before you start writing a new big project or attacking any other goal in your life, you need to where you are now.  Just like on a road trip, you need to figure out where you are on the map so you can plan the best route to your destination.

2) Where do you want to go?
Once you know where you are, the next step is to figure out where you’re going. What big goal is spurring you on this journey? Why are you taking this trip in the first place? I call this my destination—the big goal that is spurring me on my quest.  These are usually the things that end up getting written on my resolutions list.

The trouble with those lists is they usually stop there, with the big goals.  Rarely do we sit down and figure out how we’ll reach that destination.  We say “I want to write a novel” but once we put those goals on the list, we stop thinking about the how.  Then we procrastinate and procrastinate and by the time next December rolls around, we’re still thousands of words short of our goal.

3) Keep goals concrete.
Sure, it’s great to dream big and live life even bigger, but when it comes to setting goals that stick, you have to have some way of measuring how far you’ve come.  This means saying “I want to write a novel” can be a great starting point, but to be able to measure your progress, you have to give yourself a concrete goal.  Try one of these:

• I will write 1 chapter per week for a year. (That’ll give you 52 chapters… more than enough for a novel, unless of course your chapters are each a page long, in which case maybe you write more chapters per week.)
• I will write 1000 words, two days per week, for 50 weeks in the next year. (You’ll have 100K words by the end of the year and you’ll even give yourself 2 weeks of vacation away from your writing!)
• I will write and polish one short story per month for the next year. (That’s 12 short stories written and polished by the end of the year!  Hey, you could even put them all together as a collection.)

Again, going with the road trip metaphor, setting vague goals is like saying “I want to drive cross-country.”  But how do you know when you’ve gotten where you want to go?  Instead, if you say “I want to drive to this specific address in San Diego” then you have a concrete destination.  After that, all you need is to figure out how many miles you need to drive each day to make it to your goal.

4) Keep goals reasonable.
I used to have this crazy philosophy that if I set my goals super-super-high, it would push me to work harder and I’d achieve more than if I set goals that were reasonable and easier to reach.  Now, I’m not advocating that we all sit back, drink Mai Tais and not challenge ourselves, but the important thing is to keep the challenges in our life exciting but reasonable.

If we keep setting our standards so ridiculously high that we never reach them, then we’re setting ourselves up for continual failure.  This can lead us to give up or feel just plain lousy.  Instead, if we make a challenge tough but reachable, and then we actually do it, we’re setting ourselves up for continued success.  Then the next time we have a rough road ahead of us, we can look back and say “I conquered that last hurdle; I can handle this one.”  This is called building mastery and it’s what helps us keep going even when the journey ahead is a difficult one.

5) Be flexible.
It’s ridiculous to think that the goals we set for ourselves on January 1st will still be 100% exactly the right goals for us on December 31st of that same year.  Things change.  Life happens.  Our goals have to change with it.  Lately, I have taken to writing out goals each season, rather than just once per year.  Who knows, maybe this year I’ll reevaluate my goals each month.  The point is that whatever your goals may be, you need to take some time between now and next New Years to check-in and see if those goals still hold water.  Maybe they do, and that’s great!  Or maybe you’ve moved in a different direction and you need to tweak your goals accordingly.  We are humans, after all.  Not robots.  Not computers.  Things happen and we have to adjust and adapt.

This New Years, how will YOU make your Writing Resolutions stick?

As we near the end of the year, it’s good to think about where we want to go and how we plan to get there.  Like the riders in the photo (c. 1900), we need a general sense of direction–a goal–or else we will get lost in the washed-out, barren landscape.

Every few months, I do an exercise called a Goal Search where I look at my long-term goals and try to develop a series of steps to get me there.  This is an exercise I learned from Julia Cameron’s Supplies, a must-read for any artist facing creative difficulties.

The first thing you need to do in a Goal Search is figure out your destination (I call it my “Holy Grail.”)  Julia Cameron calls this same concept her True North.  Whatever name you give it, the idea is the same.  Goals can be vague like “I want to write a book” or “I want to be a writer” so you need to narrow it down to a specific goal.  A True North.  A Holy Grail.  A Destination.

Going back to that journey metaphor, overall goals are like saying “I want to take a road trip out west.”  But what is “west” exactly?  It could be Santa Fe, San Francisco or Seattle.  You need to specify exactly where you want to go.  The difference between overall goals and a specific destination is exactly that: the first is a vague sense of direction while the latter is a specific thing you want to achieve.  Once you know your destination, you can plot out a series of milestones and a specific route that will get you there.

Goal Search
• Where are you going (in general terms)?
• What’s your specific destination?
• Now map out your route: Take out a piece of paper.  On the far right, write your destination.  On the far left, write down where you are right now.  Starting from your destination, work backwards, step-by-step, mapping out each landmark you’ll have to hit to get you to that destination.
• Baby steps: Take the landmark immediately following your starting point and focus just on those two steps.  Break those steps down into baby steps.

Example:
General goal: “I want to be a writer.”
Destination: “I want to publish my book.”
Mapping the route: (Major landmarks working backwards)

• Launch book 1
• Get contract for book 1
• Sign with agent
• Send queries and pitch at conferences
• Edit manuscript, implementing suggestions from Betas
• Get comments from Beta Readers
  Etc. (continue working backwards until you get to the starting point)
• Starting Point (Finished rough draft of manuscript)

Baby steps: For the purpose of this example, let’s suppose the writer has a finished first draft but has not started editing.  The next big milestone is to send it out to Beta Readers, but there are plenty of baby steps in between.  These steps might include:

• A first read-through
• Editing for character consistency
• Editing for plot and structure
• Polishing and fixing nitty-gritty details

Note: Each of the above steps can be broken down further: chapter-by-chapter or scene-by-scene.

I often find looking at all the steps between me and my destination to be overwhelming.  Instead, I like to focus on the baby steps between me and that first landmark.  It makes the process seem much more manageable.

As we approach the new year, what are some steps you can take toward your True North, your Holy Grail, your Destination?

Every so often, it’s important to pause for a moment and take stock of where you’ve been and where you’re going.  I like to do this around holiday time, particularly around Thanksgiving, because it reminds me of all the things I have to be thankful for… things I’ve overcome in my writing journey as well as opportunities still to come.  Today we’ll be focusing on where we’ve been so we can figure out where we want to go next.

When I saw the picture on the left (a team of horses pulling a car out of a ditch, c. 1940) I knew it was perfect for this post.  How many times do we run off the road and need help getting back on track?  I know I need that kind of help all the time.

Like, when I first started developing DIY MFA, I was all mixed up about the brand and the tone of the project.  It took a savvy group of critique partners to help me focus and find my true DIY MFA voice.  These critique partners, aside from giving great advice, were also caring enough to give me “tough love” when I needed it.  After all, critiques that are only glowing and positive can only take you so far.  A true friend is not afraid to tell you when your project is not working.  They just know enough to say it in a kind and constructive way.

What about you?  Where has your writing journey taken you in the 2011 and what have you learned from it since?  Today or tomorrow, I encourage you to do a short free-write to think on this subject.  Use the questions below to prompt your writing.

Taking Stock: Where Have You Been?

• What obstacles have you faced over the past year?  How did you deal with them?  Who was there for you to help you on your way?

• What about your victories?  What were they (be specific)?  Did you celebrate them (even the small ones) in some meaningful way?  Who was there to help you be your best self?

• Did you face any disappointments in the past year?  Any people you thought were in your corner but they let you down?  Can you think of ways to salvage these relationships?  And more importantly, what will you do to nurture yourself and help yourself heal?

• Finally, what is the most important thing you learned from your writing experiences this past year?  How will you use this knowledge to fuel your writing next year?

If you like, please share in the comments a little about where you’ve been with your writing this past year.  We can all learn a lot from hearing about each others obstacles and victories.