Goal Setting Secrets for Authors

By Charmaine Ross

Writing goals, habits and mindfulness – how to keep your writing dream alive
Writing a book is so much more than the nuts and bolts of plot structure and character development. The first thing you need to do is get your head around undertaking such a huge task. Many people start writing their book and completely run out of steam after chapter three. That’s when things stage to get hard and you have to keep your head on your goals if you want to achieve your dream.
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Do you want to write a book? Do you struggle knowing how to start and achieve this enormous task? Life offers a plethora of obstacles and a huge amount of choices. No matter how much of a burning ambition you have to write your book, there never seems to be enough time. Too often people will say they have a great idea for a book, and never, ever finish it.
You need to separate what’s important and irrelevant in your life and support yourself to achieve what is commonly a life-long dream. 'Write your right goals' shares a detailed plan to help you write your book from start to finish. Don’t just let writing your book be a forever dream. Make it a reality.

How I carved out enough time in between raising children, working a job, looking after a house and husband and managed to write more than twenty novels. This book is based on my experience of overcoming mistakes I made as a newbie novelist and how I learned to make enough time in my day to realise my dream of writing a book, time after time, after time. I hope you can take advantage of my experiences so that you can write your dream book too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charmaine Ross
• Release date: Oct 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463398043

Charmaine Ross

My first foray into romance was as a fourteen year old where I fell hopelessly and eternally in love with my hero as only a teenager can. Instead of watching movies and staying up late, I would go to bed at eight thirty and continue my very romantic, very safe, love affair. Since then, I have fallen in love with many heroes, some less safe than what my teenage brain could possibly imagine. After earning a Fine Art’s Degree, a Diploma of Secondary Education and a Diploma of Marketing, I worked as a Graphic Designer in various advertising agencies as well as in-house marketing roles and am currently involved with digital marketing and everything web in my current position. But I always return to writing. Although I have travelled, I always return to my home town of Melbourne and live with my husband, two children and two cats in the ferny-greens of the Dandenongs. If I'm not working on my latest romance and falling in love with yet another hero, you’ll find me reading, watching and basically indulging in my addiction to any story on any media type I can get my fingers on.

Book preview

Chapter One

Goals

If you feel as though you’re stuck for writing time, or just not making headway in your book, maybe it’s time to set some writing goals. Setting a writing goal is a powerful process for thinking about what, how and when you’re going to write.

I’m a believer in the power of the mind. Our minds either enable us to do what we want to do, or send us in a dizzying spin of indecision. We get ‘snow blinded’ by the big picture, our brain goes into over-drive and we don’t know where to start with our desire to ‘write a book’.

After all, writing a book is a big task. An insurmountable task. If you don’t know where to start.

It takes planning to even think about writing your book and constant motivation to turn your book into a reality. Unless you’re made of pure grit or can remain completely focussed, a good way to bring your desire into reality is by setting writing goals. Let's face it, it takes weeks or even months to bring a book to reality, and life has a habit of getting in the way. It you don't make time for it, the irony is that time will become the ultimate obstacle.

I’m a planner. A goal setter. By knowing exactly what you want to achieve, when and how you are going to achieve them, you know where to concentrate your efforts. You’ll quickly be able to avoid distractions – ahem, facebook – and get down to the business of writing your book.

I wasn’t always a planner when it came to writing. I would wait ‘until inspiration struck’. Then, I thought I’d be able to sit down at the computer and my book would somehow magically write itself. I was in for a steep learning curve. Let me first say that while writing a book does rely on inspiration and creativity, those feelings don’t come along very often. When they do, you have to grab them by the neck and wring everything you can out of them until you’ve exhausted every last drop.

But what happens when the kids come home from school, and you have to help them with homework, and take them to after-school activities, and wash their clothes and cook their meals and read them bed time stories, clean the house, pay the bills (sigh)... Life happens. Time runs out pretty quickly.

Top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers from an assortment of fields set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and the short-term motivation to keep going. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of the time you have. Unless you set time aside for writing each day, it most likely will not happen. There are a plethora of more ‘important’ tasks that will all too easily whisk you away.

You may have started writing a chapter, but with the two weeks between writing it, you forget where you were up to, what you wanted to write next and what actually inspired you to write the story in the first place. You lose interest. It becomes too hard. You don’t write the next day, or the next, and suddenly you stop all together because your dream is all. Too. Hard. You never get to write your book!

My solution? Plan. Set a daily writing target.

I made time.

I set goals.

I became selfish when it came to my writing time.

(I even told my kids I was invisible between the hours and two and three in the afternoon a couple of times. Shh – don’t tell anyone)

You know what? I wrote my book. And the next. And the next. Setting goals worked for me and it can work for you, too.

Chapter Two

Write/Draw/Print/Cut and paste your Visual Goal

You need a visual reminder of your goal of writing your book. Visual goals will keep you motivated. It’s a reminder of what you’re working towards that you can look at whenever to feel yourself veering off course.

You might print out picture of book cover you like the look of. You might find a picture of your favourite author and stick them onto your paper. You might have a picture of a beautiful setting behind a laptop because one day you’re going to be a full-time author and write on the beach in some sunny country every day for a living. Yeahhhh – that dream sounds good.

The important thing is that you have a visual goal. When it’s finished, put it on your fridge, your bathroom mirror, behind your desk. Make it prominent. Put it anywhere you can see it every day.

I find this a very important task. I’m not a brain surgeon. Not even close. (I don’t even like watching shows where they show you operations – Erk.) But I know the brain works in mysterious ways.

Your brain LIKES to work.

Simply writing your goal down, makes you think about it. Consciously and subconsciously. Ever had one of those a-ha moments in the shower, when you have that clarity of thought that provided you with an answer that had alluded you? Or you remembered where you put that thing? Or that you had to get that food item from the supermarket for dinner? That’s your subconscious working.

Setting goals work the same way. Looking at your goals will get your brain working until you get an answer, or find a way to tackle a bigger problem that you just couldn’t see you way through before. That’s the subconscious brain working.

Also, seeing your goals every day brings them into a ‘top of mind’ profile. I’m a marketer and that’s a marketing phrase meaning that if you advertise anything long enough, when people want to buy that thing, they remember your product. Car advertising does with well.

Who cares that we see the latest Nissan commercial a thousand times, right? In fact, we see it so many times we don’t take any notice of it, true? However, what Nissan hopes for is that they’ve gotten into your brain on a subconscious level, that when you find in that two or three times in your life when you need to buy a car, suddenly you think that Nissan is a good choice. (I’m not advocating Nissan. It’s just an example.)

Now, a new car is a big investment. No doubt. But so are your goals. These are things that will shape your life in a desirous way. You want to do the things in your life that you want to do and achieve and experience. Your life is the biggest purchase you’re likely to make. Shouldn’t you advertise your goals to yourself? Aren’t they more important than purchasing a car?

By writing down your goals, you also make yourself accountable. You want to do that. It’s how you end up achieving writing that book. Setting your writing goals is in itself an action. One of many actions that will enable you to complete every task you need to do to achieve that goal. If you don’t write down your tasks, there’s nothing to build on.

You want to tick that box at the end of the day to show you have completed your daily task. You want to see all those ticks at the end of the week. You want to see how much your book has grown in a month of ticks.

A goal properly set is halfway reached. -- Abraham Lincoln

Chapter Three

Set A Realistic Daily Writing Target

I made the mistake in thinking I could write five thousand words a day, each and every day when I was first starting out. An average romance novel is between 50,000 and 60,000 words, so that would only take me 10 to 12 days to write a book? How hard can that be? I could churn them out. A new book a month. I’d blitz the best seller lists. My web page would put kindle to shame.

Boy, was I in for a rude shock.

I wanted to write all day and bang out ten thousand words, but I couldn’t. I was no-where even close. After about half an hour I wasn’t able to keep that level of concentration up.

Writing is pretty brain intensive stuff. I’d started at the wrong end of the equation. I was trying to start at a place that I could only reach if I’d been writing for a whole lot longer than I had.

I had to reduce my targets to be able to start in a frame that I could cope with. Don’t make the same mistake I did. You have to lead up to bigger things by starting small. Baby-steps.

For example, if you’re learning how to cook, you wouldn’t want to try a dessert they make contestants cook on MasterChef. There’s no way in the world a beginner could do that. I wouldn’t want to do that now and I’ve been cooking for twenty years! (OK – it’s a fact, I hate cooking. It’s up there with washing the floor.) But you get my drift. No, you’d cook porridge, or make an omelette, maybe bacon and eggs on toast.

Start small

It’s the same with writing. Trial fifteen minutes a day at first. You might find that is enough, or not enough. You may only have fifteen minutes in your day to write. Squeezing a little bit of time out of your day to start is easier and achievable. You’ll feel motivated to write tomorrow for another fifteen minutes. The day after that and after that because it won’t be all too much at the start.

If you find fifteen minutes isn’t enough, or you need more time, then give