Why do you write? Not the romantic version, the real one. I asked a group of writers what they’re working toward, and their unedited answers are below. Some want a career, some want a finished book on the shelf, and some want something harder to name, to be read, to be understood, to leave a mark.
What Are Your Goals With Your Writing?
Here are their responses, in their own words.
Richard Lowe
What are my goals with my writing?
- First, I want to make a good living as a freelance writer. this involves ghostwriting books, blogs, LinkedIn profiles, articles, case studies and other things. I especially enjoy writing books, and I’m working on my 23rd ghostwritten book right now. It’s due to be done this week. I’ve achieved the basic part of this goal: I’m paying the bills and the rent and so forth with my income from writing.
- Second, I written to Amazon Kindle bestsellers, which was pretty cool. One of them sold 10,000 copies and reached number 43 for three days on the Kindle top 100 list. I want to be on the New York Times and other major bestseller lists. That’s my second significant goal. And then once that’s achieved, to do it over and over.
- Third, I like helping others, so I put together a series of writing training courses, each targeted at a very narrow area where writers need help. My goal is to make this take off and help other writers grow and become better.
- Another goal is to lead a group of writers of all levels of abilities and help them by using the power of the community to increase the promotional and marketing reach of each individual dramatically. By working together, writers can reach a larger audience more easily and build more followers for their works.
- Finally, I want to interview a large number of writers, again at every stage of their writing, and share those interviews so that others may learn and be encouraged to succeed.
Wendy Jones
What are my goals. Fab question. My first, very short term, goal is to launch Bertie the Buffalo out into the world. Bertie is based on a real buffalo who went missing last year. Scotland’s very own wee escape artist is missing again as the books haven’t arrived yet. The wee scallywag likes to have people hunting for him. My medium term goal is to sell a million books. I like that number as it’s a nice ring to it. Another goal is for Bertie to be a best seller. The little chap deserves it.
Kyle Waller
Straight-forward: find my passion and find a way to get paid for it while mentoring the world and erasing the stigma surrounding Mental Illness. Writing isn’t something I do when I’m bored or have a free moment- it’s an addiction I aim to nurture into a full-blown entrepreneurship that takes off in my home country first (the United States), then spread to the world, then eventually share with the aliens in the far beyond (ok- we’re not at that level just yet- but you get the point). This is what I was meant to do and what I’ll inevitably succeed in bringing to fruition. There are yet dark corners of Humanity where evil reigns- they say the pen is mightier than the sword- I say it’s mightier than the sword but not as mighty as the mob. Words become knowledge if nurtured with care, knowledge becomes ambition, ambition becomes action and action sires change. While I’m only in the beginning phases of my ambition, I’m farther than most because I never walked away, no matter who tried to convince me to walk off the path.
Facebook: Kyle Waller
Bjørn Larssen
Short-term, I want to write the best book I possibly can. My biggest fear isn’t related to sales or reviews. It’s the thought that five years from now I’ll look at my novel and cringe, wishing it didn’t have my name on the cover and that I could destroy every copy in the universe. It’s this thought that’s so far kept me going through 19 drafts and 22 months of work on Storytellers. It also made me rewrite my second work-in-progress completely from scratch twice because of beta-readers’ feedback. I don’t need to see my name on the cover or find my book in a bookstore. (Shameful confession: I only visited an actual bookstore once in the last three years, because the person I was waiting for was late, and I was bored.)
Long-term? I want to write more books, learn more, see more places, meet more people, hear and tell more stories. I want to become better with each 100 thousand word draft I produce, to continue creating, reach further, develop, grow. In a way, it’s the same as the short-term goal. I want to turn my characters into living, breathing people (and sometimes elves or Gods).
I’m realistic (or cynical?) enough to know it’s rather unlikely that my books will be turned into Hollywood blockbusters, or that I’ll start my days by swimming in money, cackling maniacally, George R.R. Martin style. I’ve been making music for over fifteen years. Sometimes a song of mine comes on shuffle and I think “this is awesome, what’s that?” only to realize I wrote and recorded it. This is how I’d like to feel about my books years from now.
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Paty Jager
Early in our marriage my husband realized he had a happy wife when I had time to write. My goal with my writing is to write stories that entertain me and the reader. That I’m now covering my writing expenses and helping out with monthly bills is a bonus. I’ll continue to write until I can either no longer type or no longer retain a thought long enough to plot a book. My writing goal is happiness.
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Lionel Snell
My goals surprise me by their loftiness.
Like most, I’m not 100% overjoyed by the realities of existence. I also spend a lot of time trying to find reasons why this Earth falls short of Paradise (not sure how many do likewise). I notice how attitudes, prejudices, feelings and formulaic thinking often create the very conditions that are most upsetting.
So over the years I’ve spent a lot of my time exploring new ways of looking at the world, experiencing it and thinking about it, ways that I’ve found to be more interesting, ranging from more fun to more healing.
It’s not easy in a casual chat to convey a deep shift in perception, so about 40 years ago I took to writing down my discoveries and quite a few people found them interesting. And some found them positively useful.
Then I began publishing and distributing them in the 1970s around ‘alternative’ bookshops in the UK. When they’d run out of print I issued them as PDF e-books. Then I sought out a pioneering POD service, and they keep selling at a steady trickle.
I’ve had many unsolicited responses: that my books have been stimulating, inspiring, even ‘life-changing’. I myself find such responses to be so stimulating, inspiring, even ‘life-changing’, that I have never been very worried about the many free pirate copies out there. Especially as several people have written to me saying that they got a pirated copy and liked it so much that they have since bought the book.
Life is still charmingly imperfect, but I get huge satisfaction at undermining those imperfections, That’s the real goal. The response from readers is a sign that I do sometimes score.
Debbie Young
I have goals on different levels:
- Financial: to earn my living from my writing, and to improve my standard of living over time as I write more books and reach more readers (not that I’m materialistic, but I’d like to travel more and also to have no money worries and to be able to set a considerable sum aside for my old age)
- Marketing: to produce a catalog consisting of several different series, each of which draws in different readers, who may also want to try the other series and keep following them as I add new volumes. I see this as the equivalent of a conjuror setting more and more plates spinning at once, so that I can keep setting up new plates as the others go on spinning (and raising revenue)
- Social: although my cozy mystery novels and short stories are mostly light, fun, humorous reads, they all also contain serious social and moral messages, some of them general about society e.g, look out for your neighbor, be more tolerant of others, try to see the world through their eyes instead of condemning them (suitable messages for the age we live in), and others gently campaigning against things I feel strongly about and want to raise awareness of, e.g. how to avoid controlling relationships, the perils of gambling, the dangers of religious intolerance
While fulfilling the financial goals will enable me to keep writing full-time, and meeting the marketing objectives will make me more likely to reach my financial targets, it’s the social goals that are by far the most important to me, and these are my prime drivers for writing in general, and I particular for writing the kind of books that I write.
Author website: www.authordebbieyoung.com
Twitter: @DebbieYoungBN
Jo Ullah
I have a lot of stories in my head and I want to get as many as possible, to the best of my ability, out on the page – be that paper or electronic. I hope to get faster without dropping any of the quality, and grow my skill set too.I’m really enjoying the company of other writers I been finding over the last few years, so I’d like that to continue in the positive and productive light I’ve been currently so lucky to experience. I want to be able to share what I’ve learned and encourage other new writers to express their ideas. And I want to achieve long lasting financial security through my writing.
www.joullah.com
Thomas J Eyre
The answer to the question what are my goals with my writing is quite short.
First, I have stories clamouring inside me that want to get out, so my first goal is to write the stories for the sake of the stories that want to be written.
Then I see my writing as a new career path to follow and one that I can physically do, though the mental agility that’s necessary for an author I do find a challenge due to poor short-term memory
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Lou Holly
I always aim very high with my goals, and that goes for my writing as well. When my wife and I published Keep Rockin’ Magazine we ended up with subscribers in all fifty states and eleven countries. Now that I’m writing crime novels, my goals are New York Times reviews and film versions of my books.
Sherry Linker
Setting writing goals is a critical time management habit I set for myself. Otherwise, I get distracted by new ideas or projects, and before I know it, I can easily fall behind in my writing. I set up an action plan with goals for rough drafts, edits and finals. For long term goals, I keep a notebook of ideas. Currently I’m working on a novel, “Haunting of Maple Creek” while outlining another novel. As a former magazine editor, I learned to work well under multiple deadlines. In addition, I joined NaNoWriMo for the first time this month. This should help me exceed my writing goals for November. If anyone else has participated in this, I’d love to hear about your experience!
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Bonnie Dillabough
I hone my craft by reading the best in my genre, studying styles, plot arcs, characterization and world-building. More importantly I practice my craft daily by making and keeping appointments with myself to focus entirely on putting words on the page.
I set daily word count goals and exceed them. I participate generously with my fellow writers in forums and mentoring groups.
I write about topics that are interesting to me and about concepts I’m passionate about and make my readers feel that passion. It’s what writers do.
Dixie Maria Carlton
My goals for my writing: Mine are simple simple but not easy ones.
- To earn a good living from my writing, with consistent income for the rest of my life, also affording me a lifestyle of travel, exploration, and research in interesting places.
- To have one of my books be turned into a movie, during my lifetime, because -wow, how interesting that would be. 🙂
- perhaps the most important one, is to have my writing serve as great ignition for good conversation.
Instagram @curatingconversations
Jo-Anne Blanco
My author Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JoAnneBlancoBooks/
Robin Donovan
My primary goal has always been to entertain my readers and make them laugh, while also making them think. To give them an escape from the troubles in their lives. Based on feedback (and not just from my mother), I’m grateful that I seem to be on track with that goal. There’s no better feeling than when a reader is effusive about my work.
When I read this Roundup question, it got me thinking about my goals beyond the readers’ reaction and I realized it’s a very basic goal. I want to enjoy the writing experience even more.
That’s not as simple as it sounds.
I enjoy writing cozy murder mysteries and I enjoy doing the speaking and signing engagements, hell, I even enjoy editing, but all these components can interconnect in a way that makes writing either a joy or an exercise in self-debasement or both, kind of like a seesaw.
To start with I enjoy the writing, but feeling pressure to hurry up can bring that enjoyment to a screeching halt. Once the book is released there’s a huge amount of work to gain any level of awareness. I enjoy guest blogging and interviewing, I enjoy public speaking. But if you’ve ever done an author event to an audience of two, even considering there are torrential rains outside, you know how demoralizing that can be.
Although many of us don’t get into writing for the money (a lot of you are laughing out loud right now) it’s nice to see some return on your investment. There was a time when I referred to my writing as a “very costly hobby.” Although I still don’t rely on my writing as my livelihood, there’s no denying that monetary gain is a measure of success, and when you’ve poured your guts out to create your masterpiece, any measure of success is a plus.
One day euphoric success, the next day humbling disappointment, and repeat. My great grandmother had a saying that seems to fit “what never makes you laugh will never make you cry.”
My goal would be to see the scales a bit more heavily weighted toward the laughing.
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The common thread
Read these answers together and the individual voices start to harmonize. That’s the value of a roundup like this one. No single writer has the whole answer to what are your goals with your writing, but the collected experience of many working writers gets closer to it than any one of us could alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
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