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Last week in part one of this two-part series we talked about the importance of evaluating where you’ve been and where you are in your creative career to make sure it still matches your goals, what drives you, and what will allow you to feel satisfaction and fulfillment in it so that you can happily sustain your writing career and grow in the direction that will be most meaningful and rewarding for you.

Here in part two we’ll talk about taking that information and using it to make specific, actionable plans for where we want our careers to go: how you want to spend your time and energy in ways that will offer you more satisfaction and day-to-day meaning in your writing career, and what changes you might want to make to effect that.

If you went through the process we talked about last week, then you’ve already begun to identify what you want going forward, whether it’s the same as what you’ve wanted in the past or has shifted as you and your career have evolved. This is often where many authors stop: with those loose, underdeveloped ideas of their career goals and how to get there. And it’s often why their careers fail to develop the way they hope.

We need to dig deeper than that, past the external goal or milepost—bestsellerdom or getting an agent or making six figures from your writing, etc. Those are destination dreams—great to have, but outside your control, and so basing your career or career plan on them isn’t helpful. You can be the greatest writer who ever lived, with the best story ever written, and it’s still no guarantee of those results.

And we want to dig deeper than vague motivations: “I love to write/tell stories,” or “I want to share my writing” or “I want to be a full-time writer.” These are also too amorphous to help power us toward our goals.

So let’s focus on the concrete motivations, goals, and values that underlie those destination dreams and are within your control, which we began to explore last week.

Get Clear, Specific, and Concrete

Take some time to think what you want out of your writing and writing career—not what you hope it may yield in the way of external reward, or the product of it, but what do you want out of the day-to-day reality of being a writer, the process? That’s the part over which you have control, and it makes up the vast majority of the time you’ll spend pursuing this career, so it needs to jell with your values, what you actually want—the foundational elements of building a satisfying career and a happier life.

As I discovered in my annual analysis of my career, mine came down to a few general “wants”:

• Less constant pressure with deadlines; less of a packed schedule to let me more fully enjoy my work
• More professional/personal balance
• More time with my husband and family and friends, and for travel and hobbies

Once you have an idea what you want, it’s time to get specific and granular, and dig down to the core motivators that drive you and shape your work and life.

What do you want out of the day-to-day reality of being a writer, the process? That’s the part over which you have control, and it makes up the vast majority of the time you’ll spend pursuing this career.

For instance, when I say I want more “me” time and less work stress—the hackneyed “better work-life balance”—what do I concretely mean by that?

I mean that work does not bleed into my personal time. That I’m not working every day of the week and keeping long hours that run into the evening. That I’m not constantly stressed or worried that I’m falling behind or not getting everything done. That I let go of thinking about work and leave it in the office at the end of each day.

Let’s say one of the “wants” on your list was more time to write, and less guilt about taking writing time for yourself. Ask yourself what you actually, specifically mean by that.

Maybe you mean you don’t want to constantly be stressing about your towering to-do list that keeps you from fully focusing on your story when you’re writing. That you want uninterrupted private time to sink into the story, instead of always feeling like you’re snatching superficial little moments to spew a handful of words onto the page.

Keep clarifying: How much time would feel rewarding? I know authors who’ve written whole novels in snatches of five, ten, twenty minutes whenever they could get them, but what do you want: an hour? Two? More? Be clear.

Those are good clarifications, but if you want to make them happen, you have to get even more intentional and concrete. What specific actions and changes can you make to effect those goals?

In my case, I’ve already initiated some of those changes that will yield me part of what I want:

• I’m scheduling an extra day for first passes so I don’t have to do the initial cold read of manuscripts in my personal time, as I have most of my career.
• I’m also scheduling in regular administrative days. Answering emails, doing sample edits, invoicing, drawing up contracts, etc.—all this takes a fair amount of time, and trying to cram it on top of an already full editing/writing/teaching schedule has been a significant contributor to my overwork and stress.

What might similar specific actions look like for you, to gain more unstressed writing time?

It might mean reexamining your to-do list: Does everything on it really need doing? Now? By you? Or you might need to reframe the way you treat it: Do your to-dos feel like taskmasters, imperative obligations you have to check off asap or they just keep looming over you, making you feel inadequate or incomplete until you complete them? What if you started regarding them not as obligations, but options—would that help you let go of some of the stress around them that impinges on your time and concentration for writing?

Attaining this part of my goals—more professional/personal balance—means reexamining some of my other goals, like being available to help more authors than I currently can, or maintaining my income level. Making adjustments and concrete plans that reconcile all your values is part of this planning too (and one I’ll talk about in a future post).

You may find you have to adjust some of your goals—maybe you can’t find three uninterrupted hours of time every day, but can you find it on two or three days of the week? Or could you find an hour a day, or every weekday? Or thirty minutes? Setting realistic goals makes it much more likely you’ll achieve them.

Beware of Backslides

These shifts aren’t easy. Regardless of my good intentions I tend to fall into the same habit of overfilling my time so relentlessly often that when I presented my new relaxed workflow plans to my husband and best friend, independently each one warned me, “Okay, but once you open up more time, don’t use it to start a whole new work project.”

Reader, within days of this new resolution I was outlining a brand-new prong of my business I could develop in all the time I would be freeing up.

There’s nothing wrong with having new ideas and stretching yourself—except that in this case, right now, where I am in my career and personal goals, that works completely against what I so carefully determined I want in last week’s process.

Ringing any bells? Like when you’re working through your WIP you want to finish, making progress…but that shiny new idea keeps singing its seductive song?

Even when you set clear, concrete goals, it’s easy to fall back into your old ruts and habits, or distract yourself from the work it may take to get where you know you want to go. That’s why I advocate writing down your priorities, goals, and plan—specific and detailed—to refer back to anytime you find yourself pulled off course.

Also, it’s not enough not to do those things you know will derail you from what you want. You also have to delineate the practical actions you need to take to actively do the things that move you closer to it.

If I say I want more downtime for myself and people I want to spend time with, for instance, what will I change to make that happen? Already I’ve started making regular hiking dates with a friend, and today I took part of the morning off to go to a pickleball clinic with her as well (almost unheard-of for me on a weekday!).

It’s not enough not to do those things you know will derail you from what you want. You also have to delineate the practical actions you need to take to actively do the things that move you closer to it.

If you say you want more time to write more…you have to make more writing time—and take it for your writing. That won’t happen if you simply set an amorphous goal: What does that concretely look like?

• Reconsider your schedule—your to-do list, other obligations, other priorities, etc., to see where you can open up a little more time. That might mean things like delegating some tasks (can you order groceries instead of shopping, for instance?), letting some things go or doing them a little less “perfectly” (does the side dish you promised to bring to a get-together really have to be homemade?), or making choices about your priorities (can you get up a little earlier? skip that second episode of your evening TV show?).
• Once you free up the extra time, schedule it: When will you write, and for how long? Show up when you say you will—every single time, like a job. That doesn’t have to be daily, necessarily, but it should be regular and it should be routine—and it should be nonnegotiable except for the most serious issues.
• Once you show up for your writing time, write. It’s easy and tempting and seems oh so logical to use that time for other writing-related tasks. But “research” can too easily descend into internet rabbit holes and detours; “working out the story” can lead you down a primrose path of distraction or into the dead end of idea paralysis; and “marketing and publicity” is a one-way road to endless social-media scrolling. If your goal is to write more, then you have to actually write more. Finding extra time to actually write means also factoring in the time you need or already use for other aspects of writing.

If you need help or support or accountability, then that’s part of your specific game plan too. I needed to talk through some of my workflow and goals with someone who understood the business, so I scheduled a conversation with a trusted colleague to do that, which helped me clarify some of my processes and see additional ways of achieving what I wanted.

I also showed my hubs my priority list and asked him to hold me accountable to not saying yes to things that weren’t on it. And I asked him and my best friend to call me on it if I started falling back into the habit of overbooking myself, or didn’t start pursuing more of the nonwork interests I’d talked about.

Watch for mental chicanery—it’s very easy to keep doing what you’ve been doing no matter how strongly held your new goals may be. Only yesterday I was offered a project from a publisher and was contorting my schedule to try to fit in before I realized I needed an intervention, and went to talk it through with my husband; this morning I said no. Inertia, fear, and all your regular demons can often come out in full force when you’re making a change, even a positive one.

Get Granular with All of Your Goals

You can go through this process for every goal and value on your list you started from last week’s post:

• Dig down to what’s beneath the external goals to what really drives you—what you want your day-to-day life to look like, the journey and not the destination: the process of your career, rather than the product
• Clarify what you actually mean by your general wants—the more specific and granular, the better
• Make a concrete, practical plan for moving toward those goals
• Follow the plan relentlessly
• Get help/support if you need it, and be alert for mental hijinks and inertia keeping you from moving forward toward your goals and values (go back and revisit your earlier steps if you lose focus or momentum)

At the end of this process you’ll have several valuable written documents that I use as cornerstones for my own business: a mission statement (your values—what drives you; mine is posted on my website), a priority list to help you arrange your time and energy in service of those values, and a clear, actionable business plan to put them in motion and keep you on track.

Writers are artists, creatives—but you’re also running a business: your writing career. In The Intuitive Author I cite the Webster’s definition of a career: “a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling” that involves the “pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement.”

That describes most every writer I’ve ever known, whether they earn a living from their writing or not, whether published or prepublished, or even those who write simply for their own creative outlet. Every day you spend on your writing, every word you write…it’s all part of the building blocks of your career.

Treat it—and yourself—with attention, intention, and respect.

Okay, authors, let this community be your first accountability buddy: What is it you actually, specifically want from your career moving forward—your core day-to-day life as a writer—and how will you put that into concrete action?

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