Post #70 – Women’s Memoirs, Author Conversations – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
It’s Day 2 of 2012. Where Are Your New Year’s Resolutions?
If you created a written list of your New Year’s Resolutions, congratulations. I hope you made a separate list for your writing aspirations. After all, how will we know if we accomplished our goals if we don’t know what they are?
The next step is fulfilling your resolutions. And today, Women’s Memoirs has a few suggestions for your year of storytelling — suggestions that will help you keep making progress on your writing life.
1. Look at your memoir writing resolutions. Perhaps they are resolutions for your journaling. Either way, read through your list.
Alternate 1. Oops. You were too busy to make a list of writing resolutions. That’s okay. Write them today. We had a great guest post yesterday that might give you some ideas.
2. Be specific about your writing goals for the year. Instead of “Write more,” detail how much time you will write and how often.
3. Make some of your goals easy to achieve and put them at the top of your list. This will give you a boost. You’ll see that you can accomplish your resolutions.
4. Break big goals into manageable steps. Remember, baby steps will gets you across the room — even across town by the end of the year. However, stating you will leap tall buildings in a single bound will result in failure. That means at the end of the year, you’ll be right where you are now.
5. Assess your progress on a regular, even daily basis. Have a goal of writing for 15 minutes in your journal each morning? At bedtime, see if you were able to write. If not, perhaps you’ll write for 10 or 15 minutes before you turn off the light. That way you are still on target. If you can’t achieve a specific goal, such as writing for five hours each week, then examine what went wrong and figure out what you can do to not encounter the same problem the following week. DON’T tell yourself you’ll just write for 10 hours the next week. It’s okay to miss a goal. Everyone does. If you keep adding the missed hours to the future goal, you’ll soon ditch the goal completely because it will become impossible to fulfill. Remember: baby steps, baby steps, baby steps. Just try to keep some momentum going. Over time, as you establish your routines, it will become easier to maintain them.
6. Anticipate and write down possible hurdles to achieving your goals. By thinking them through right now, you will be more prepared and just may be able to jump over them. At least you’ll know they are coming and may decide to walk around them even if it means it takes you more time.
Good luck with your memoir writing and journaling in 2012. Your have stories to tell and we want to hear them. Storytelling is vital to our health and to our families. Perhaps you’ll even decide to share your stories more widely through publication.
