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Tip 5: Set Your Long-Term Writing Goals

The best way to be an organized and productive writer you must ensure that you know where you are going in your writing career. To do this, you must set and assess your long-term writing goals on a regular basis. These are typically the writing goals you’d like to achieve in the next year. Once you determine what they are, write them down and put them in a prominent place. To create your organized list of goals, write down the manuscripts you want to write and revise in the next year. Brainstorm your list if you need to and decide on how many manuscripts its realistic for you to write this year, given your schedule. Usually, working writers can write one or two manuscripts a year if they schedule ten hours a week to write. This might sound like a lot of hours. But if you consistently write, even for twenty minutes at a time, you can easily write for that amount of time and even more. From your brainstormed list, determine the most important manuscripts you’d like to focus on. Choose no more than three manuscripts to complete. Then put the other manuscripts on your list for next year. Ideally, create this list at the beginning of the year. By January 1st of each year make sure you have a good idea of what you’d like to accomplish by the end of the year. This is your road map to success. Your long-term goals are the foundation of your writing career. So, don’t treat creating this list as superfluous or unnecessary. It is necessary to know where you are going before you start embarking on your journey. Once you have your list of long-term writing goals, you should create your list of short-term goals. These are your writing goals for the next three to six months. This list of goals will help you set weekly and monthly goals. I will discuss how to set your short-term goals in the next tip. To be most successful as a working writer, you must take steps to become more organized by always take stock of where you are going in your writing career by writing down your goals and following-through.