Post your goals for this month and let us know how you got on with last month’s goals.
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? Check out the comments from last month.
And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!
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Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
- Write a story a day in May – everyone!
- Revise at least 10 short stories – Iraide
- Write two short stories. – Jami
- Attend one writers’ conference – Julie
- Write fable for WordFactory competition – Sonya
- Re-read the backstory pieces I wrote in May and see if I can use them within my novel – Monique
- Research the market – Jami
- Focus on my serial – Maureen
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
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I’m so impressed with everyone! I didn’t do as I planned for June because I got drawn into researching character profiles and then creating them for my characters in the stories I’d written in May.
For July I plan to complete this task and do final drafts of two of the stories.
I am away from home and have weak WiFi but I’ll post when I can.
First hello to the community.
I’ve joined to find assistance for rewiring my brain to make writing a daily habit.
Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.
For the rest of this month; I will follow the writing prompts – write A story a day – and begin to integrate myself into the group.
Hi!
My goal is to write at least three times a week during the month of May. I may be able to do everyday, but I want to start with 3 a week as I balance my full time job.
Happy Writing 🙂
I can identify with having difficulty getting my story out of my head and on to the page. I’ve been working on one novel for over six years now. I feel like if I could just run a cable from my head into the computer and upload it straight from my brain, I would have a fully finished novel, with fascinating characters that do fascinating things, but every time I try an write it, the story comes out flat and the characters are two dimensional paper cutouts. I obviously don’t have any solutions, but if someone else has a comment, I’d be glad to read it.
I met my goals for April. Most days, I worked on a poem for at least 30 minutes. On a few days, I didn’t write, but on other days, I wrote for an hour or more, so I actually produced more poems than I had anticipated.
I’ve got one more poem on my mind for today. Tomorrow, I plan to switch to revision and submission mode — unless some day this month a new poem keeps nagging me and won’t let me go. This happens every few days.
More specifically, my goals for May 2019 are:
to work on poem revision and submission for at least 30 minutes each day.
To contribute at least one more personal story to a website that I am now a contributor for, and to post that story to my blog and to the aforementioned website.
To work on re-plotting my novel whenever it begs me to, and I have extra time. As you can probably tell from the goals above, I feel drawn to other types of creative writing lately. Even though these other types of creative writing come much more easily to me and I find them very rewarding, I’m a little bothered by these changes in my writing life because — I’ll put it this way — I’ve always wanted to be a fiction writer because I’ve had a drive to use words to create. However, I’ve never had tons of ideas for fiction, as I do with the poetry and the creative nonfiction. I’ve usually frozen when I’ve read fiction prompts, and when I’ve forced myself to produce something in response to the prompts, I’ve the result may be one out of thirty times. These feelings have been hard for me to acknowledge because I like reading fiction so much, but I also like reading poetry and nonfiction. I have felt like fiction is popular with more people than poetry and creative nonfiction are. Honestly, I think that’s the main reason I was trying to write fiction. I feel like I was trying to be someone I wanted to be instead of who I was. I think I’m coming to appreciate the writer kind of I am right now, even if that’s not the kind of writer I thought I was, or wanted to be, for a long time.
All this is not to say that I don’t like the idea for my novel. I’d love to read it, but as a reader, I haven’t enjoyed the results so far when I have tried to write it. I enjoy what the characters do in my head, but I haven’t really seen a complete, engaging story. When I try to turn certain scenes into a longer story on paper, it feels like it drags so badly. So far, I haven’t enjoyed trying to turn what’s in my head into something concrete. And if what I’m writing drags for me, how can it not drag for potential readers?
This is after years of taking classes on fiction writing, going to workshops, reading tons of books on fiction writing and story structure. I know I’ve said a lot here, but I guess I needed to work some things out.
Has anyone out there had experiences similar to mine? Does anyone have any thoughts on what I’ve posted here?
No goals last month.
Goals for May: Hang in there, writing a story a day as long as I can.
This Saturday I’ll attend a writing workshop, hoping to connect with like-minded people in my isolated town of 2000.
Enjoy the conference! Good luck with the writing 🙂
Write a story a day.
Resubmit a story that was declined to a different market.
That’s it for writing goals this month; the rest of my life is too full to add anything else!
One down! Thirty to go!
Hello!
For April, I planned to work on 30,000 words of a novel and I somehow managed to finish on time!
For May, I hope to be able to complete one short story a day, everyday.
Good luck everyone!
Very nice! Well done!
Good luck!
With so much else going on this month, my plan is simple:
Outline a story every day
Craft a 100 word story from somewhere within that bigger story
If I can do that 31 times, I reckon I’ll be rolling in story material for the rest of the year!
That’s what I really love about this, all of the stories I have to work on later! Sometimes they end up quite different than the initial attempt, but all the ideas are there with beginnings-middles-ends.
Hello!
I haven’t posted monthly goals since December or January (Can’t remember which). Since then, I have written sporadically. However, this May I am going to do Story A Day. I will write a story every day. And I will also start posting goals each month because I think I was getting more writing done when I was posting goals than when I didn’t post goals.
Great to have you with us, Natalie.
I definitely find myself more productive when I post goals (and when I remember to check them ten days before the end of the month so I can actually do some of them before reporting in again on the first…)
Hi, all,
For April, my plans were to:
*do Camp Nanowrimo (revision of my November Nano novel). Done. It went well, although there is, of course, more to be done.
*submit a flash fiction piece to a contest. Done.
*continuing with regular blog posts: I had six posts in April, which is good for me. A combination of my slow re-read of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and posts about writing.
I also ended up with the final (I hope!) edits on a story that will be published later this year. I submitted those yesterday.
So, for May, my plans are:
*Story A Day. My plan is to do a story every day. Based on past experience, I’m thinking they’ll each be around 700 words.
*Research and thinking about a couple of longer short story ideas.
*More blog posts!
*And returning to my final edits of my almost-really-completely-done novel.
Good luck, everyone!
Looking forward to trying to keep up with you!
My goals for May are simple – a story a day – 31 total.
I will blog at least 3 times a week.
I will attend the new in real life group once.