“It is never too late to start doing your New Year’s Resolutions. Just because you didn’t start them on January 1, doesn’t mean these objectives weren’t good objectives, or that you shouldn’t work on them… Chances are you will find lots of solid goals to start working on. Better late than never is a great thing to keep in mind at times like this.”
Edward W. Smith, One Minute Motivator
There are tons of posts crowding my email and clamoring for attention. But one daily email I always pop open is Ed Smith’s One Minute Motivator (brightmoment.com) This bit of wisdom is free and always brightens my day. Ed is a motivational speaker and the author of Sixty Seconds to Success, which I plan to check out soon.
Ed’s idea about getting your New Year Resolutions back on track struck a chord today because a fellow writer, Joe Owens (Joe’s Musings, joeowensblog.wordpress.com), wrote a comment on my blog. I just love receiving feedback from my blog readers! In his note, Joe said that he enjoyed my post Contest Cornucopia, because “part of my writing strategy this year is to find and enter contests.”
Joe’s phrase, “writing strategy” caught my eye. Thinking strategically about our writing and what we want to accomplish sounds like a smart and fruitful idea, doesn’t it? And yet so often, to be honest, I’m not all strategic when it comes to my writing life. One reason may be that “strategy” is one of those business buzzwords that’s a holdover from my corporate marketing days and so I’m a bit resistant about importing it into my creative universe. Think I need to get over this!
Here’s a good working definition of the word “strategy” from The Compact Oxford Dictionary: “a plan designed to achieve a particular long-term aim.” Now this sounds totally applicable to my writing. Certainly in order to get my YA novel out into the marketplace, I’m going to need a plan for acquiring an agent and one for marketing.
So, as one of our “it’s-never-too-late” New Year’s Resolutions, just as Joe is doing, let’s start thinking in a more focused, strategic way about what we want to achieve over the next 12 months. What do we need to do to write dangerously, put ourselves out there, get to the next level in our craft, get into print? Whatever it is, let’s set an intention as Joe did and make steady progress toward it every day. Write on!