New Page 1

"If You Don't Know Where You're Going....":

How Setting Goals Can Help You Write More Effectively

On George Harrison's album Brainwashed, there's a song called "Any Road" which has the lyrics, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you." Wandering without a map may be fun in certain instances, and it can take you to places you'd never go (or even know about) otherwise. But when you're writing or trying to write, simply sitting in front of the paper or computer without a plan can result in much frustration and an unproductive writing session. In my personal experience, the muse favors those who have a goal and a method for reaching that goal over those who simply wait for inspiration. Three important goals for any writer to set are the goal or goals she wants her story to achieve, writing habits she has to develop to meet those goals, and long-term goals for her writing career so she can find the best audience for her work. So, without further ado, let's set the goal for this essay as discussing each of these goals and how to set them.

Before you can write the first sentence of your story, you need to know how the story will end. This way, every scene you write will lead the characters and the readers toward that ending. In order to set up the plot and scenes in a story, you have to examine your characters' goals. For example, in Catalyst in the Crucible, Paul's main goal is to ensure safety for his loved ones. To accomplish this goal, he explores many options: he removes himself from public scrutiny, he makes himself physically stronger and practices self-defense and fencing, he helps his friend Scott create an artificial intelligence who can track down enemies more effectively, and he helps establish a colony on another planet where he and his loved ones can live. At the end of the story, he will have to decide which of these options work and which ones don't. For further examples of how characters' goals affect the plot, see my essay Creating Suspense in Beatles Fan Fiction.

How much detail you plot out before you start writing depends on how much control you need to assert over the story. Some writers will draw up very detailed outlines of everything that will happen in the story before they start writing it; others may start with a few mental images and develop the story from there. I'm probably somewhere in the middle; I don't write outlines, but I develop a beginning, an ending, and a few key intermediate scenes before I start. In essence, when I write, I fill in the details between the key scenes, like links in a necklace between gemstones. One reason for using only a very rough outline is that sometimes a story can change as you write it. For instance, when I set out to write "Move Over Ms. L.," the original ending I had in mind was that Joanna would return to her present time after having attempted to change history by saving her great-grandfather John Lennon. I had pictured her stepping out of a time machine (which at the time I thought of as some sort of room-sized device), asking for an encyclopedia, and throwing the encyclopedia against the wall after looking up her great-grandfather and seeing the dates 1940-1980 still listed. After doing some research, the time machine turned into the Sagan, a research spaceship capable of passing unharmed through a wormhole into an alternate universe. This was enough research for me to sit down and start writing. And as I wrote and got to know Joanna a little better, I realized that the original ending wouldn't work. Joanna had been hurt by the numerous comparisons drawn between her and John as she was growing up, but she was too kind a person to let someone else suffer the same fate if she could prevent it. So she "offered" to become the mother of John's clone and raise him to be his own person, not just a faint imitation of John. This required me to abandon the original ending of my story, but it resulted in a much stronger story than I would have written otherwise. The lesson to be learned from this is that although you need to have a story goal or an ending in mind when you start a story, sometimes you need to change it. You need to have a goal to get you started, but if a better goal comes along, you need to be flexible enough to work for that one instead.

Story endings aren't the only thing you need to keep in mind as you write; you also need to consider what you want to accomplish by writing the story in the first place. Do you simply want to entertain others, or do you want to teach a moral lesson or illustrate some theme as well? You also need to consider who your readers will be. How much education do they have? How familiar will they be with the conventions of your genre, if you write in a genre? And what sort of expectations will they have when they read your story? For instance, I assume that the readers of my Lennon's Line series are more likely to be readers of Beatles fan fiction than they are of science fiction, so I tend to make my future Earth more like our world than the future will probably be. This way, my readers won't have to deal with too many strange terms and concepts. I also assume that they are intelligent but probably don't have much of a science background (they've probably heard of time travel and cloning but don't know the real science behind them, for instance). I try to work a brief explanation of the science into the story, but I keep it simple so as not to slow down the story.

Now that you have a sense of what will happen in your story and who you're writing it for, you need to develop ways to get the story written. In other words, you need to develop a writing habit. After listening to professional writers and my writing friends discuss their work habits, I've come to the conclusion that the most successful writers are the ones who write every day. This is borne out by my own experience too. It's not just that by writing every day, you accumulate more words than the people who wait for inspiration to strike; you also gain more inspiration because you're thinking about your story more frequently. How much you actually write each day depends on how quickly you can write, how many stories you're working on, and how much time you have to write. One professional author I know of works on four stories at a time; he writes about a page and a half of each one every day. Other authors I've met or listened to have more modest goals; one might write 200 words a day of a short story, while another author might find progress in simply organizing notes or writing a paragraph every day. The key is to find a goal you can consistently meet and do so every day. My personal goal is to write about 500 words of the main story I'm working on (at the moment, Catalyst in the Crucible) every day. If I work on another story, that also counts towards my daily quota, but I feel that Catalyst is my top priority at the moment. Some days I fall short of my goal; other days I exceed it. But the important thing is that every day I make some progress on the story and think about it, which makes it easier to come back to it every day. If you can manage to write every day -- even if just for half an hour -- you'll find that your story will be finished more quickly than if you work on it haphazardly. Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare applies to writers as well as animals.

Once you've figured out the plot, other goals, and the audience of your story; and have actually finished it, then you need to figure out what you want to do it. If you've written the story for your own amusement or for a few friends, you may be happy enough posting it on your website or maybe having a few copies printed and bound for private distribution. If you've written something for a wider audience, then you'll want to submit it to a publisher whose publishing goals match your writing goals. If the publisher accepts your story, then you'll have to help publicize it. If not, then you need to mail the story out to the next-best publisher on your list. While you're waiting for a response, it's time to set more goals for yourself by working on the next story.

Setting goals gives a purpose to your writing -- and to your own life. Sometimes goals change along the way, and sometimes despite your best efforts, circumstances prevent you from reaching your goal. But it is still better to finish a story than to be among the thousands of people who want to write a book "someday." As an unknown person once said, "If you shoot for the moon and miss, you are still among the stars."