Hey, novelists, this is serious stuff. In 1979 the Harvard Business School surveyed their graduates and turned up some shocking news: only 3% of them had set “clear written goals” and a plan for achieving them.
13% had goals, but hadn’t written them down. But here was the shocker: 84% of them had no specific goals at all.
10 years later, the same grads were surveyed again: “The 13 percent of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all.”
The 3% who had clear, written goals were earning, on average, 10 times as much as the other 97 percent put together.
If that’s not enough to make you run, not walk, to your desk to start setting goals, you’d better have another pot of coffee.
Want more? Zig Ziglar, the motivational guru, details 5 “lessons” in goal setting. It’s a specific, step by step planning formula for coming up with productive goals. (to blog link 2).
Frankly, it never occurred to me that jotting down a set of written goals and refining them as Ziglar directs could be so powerful.
Novelists, fiction writers…I have a question for you. Can Ziglar’s process work for us? After all, don’t we often profit from serendipity and delay?
Take outlines, for example. I’ve come to think of them NOT as what they appear to be– highly specified story goals–but as road maps to guide our daily probes into darkness.
Why a road map? Because novelists are called upon to make constant changes of direction based on nothing firmer than intuition. We are constantly revising our story goals, in response to instinct alone. Without a road map, we might disappear down too many long, irrelevant dirt roads.
What do you think? Can Ziglar’s process work for you? I’m going to try it. I still believe that clear goals are powerful motivators as well as organizing tools, even if they keep changing.
What about you? Written or not, what are your fiction goals for 2009?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a great reminder to all of us. I have known about goal setting and Zig Ziglar for more years than I care to remember, but have not put it into regular practice. This is a good time, at the start of a brand new year to rectify that. I’ve been told goal setting has magic in it. I’m going to try it and find out!
Kit Stewart
I love the idea of setting clear, ambitious-but-attainable goals. A daily word count is a terrific idea, too. For me, committing to a period of time rather than a word count has also been very helpful. I’d like to finish writing another novel this year, but I need to think about the nuts and bolts of how I’m going to accomplish that.
When setting goals, I often get stuck when it comes to editing. For example, if a story or novel is in the editing phase, what sort of goal do I set? Should I vow to edit a certain number of pages? I’d love to hear people’s thoughts.
Goals are essential to me, because I’m a great procrastinator. I’ll pour Drano down a perfectly good drain and wait half an hour to rinse it out when writing isn’t going easily. But I can limit that aimless foofling by knowing that I have an absolute minimum (in my case, 1000 words) that I have to complete even if I’m still working at midnight. And for me, it’s seven days a week except for something really out of the ordinary, and never, ever, under any conditions two days off in a row. The longer I stay away from a problem, the bigger its teeth get.
As far as editing is concerned, if you mean self-editing, I let about six weeks lapse before I even start, to let the fat rise to the surface. Then I read it aloud to my astonishingly patient wife, mark everything I don’t like out loud, write down everything she didn’t like, couldn’t follow, or fell asleep during, and then give myself ten days to fix it all. If you mean responding to my editor’s suggestions, I do it almost immediately, starting with the biggest problems, since fixing them often has an impact on the rest of the book.
Gee, what a long answer.
Distraction is the enemy of goal oriented behavior, and many of the random disltractions come right out of the tool we use every day – the computer. When I get an email, I heard a prompt and see it ghost over the upper right side of my screen. Twitterfox pops up every new tweet. And on and on. Writer Cory Doctorow has gathered a few good, time tested principles for getting work done in a disciplined, goal-oriented way, despite all. Thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Lisa Kenney, whose tweet (yeah, I know) pointed me toward Doctorow’s post: http://tinyurl.com/8nSkox