Many of us have been scrambling to meet our November writing challenge deadline, no matter which challenge platform we participated on, 30th November is the completion date. There are two schools of thought about writing deadlines: a) an excellent resource b) creates complete panic. However, setting a deadline for any writing project, forces us to write, curbs those ‘reasons’ we come up with to ‘not’ write, and allows us to estimate and plan our writing time.

We can use the November challenge format to develop our own schedule in order to increase our focus and alleviate the stress of a deadline. Obviously, there is no reason to use one month as the goal date, it is better to look at realistic goal setting, that works within your life and commitments. Taking a step by step approach with weekly, or monthly goals allows us to plan. We can block off writing time each day, or week, schedule writing sprints, make interim deadlines, make a list of tasks, and set word count goals. With a deadline we can stay efficient, and improve our overall productivity.

You utilize ‘down time’ periods in your life, such as vacations, seasonal holidays, commute time, or time away from home for other reasons. Use these periods as task opportunities to plan, research, create, and write. Something like:

Create main character sheets.

Plan your plot arc.

Research backgrounds, locations, specific topics etc.

Write out scenes, or dialogue.

Decide on your opening sentence/paragraph.

Choose a beginning, middle and end.

Set a completion word count.

Be realistic on how long each item will take, schedule your time and give yourself some leeway – life has a habit of doing a U-turn. Don’t beat yourself up if you miss a deadline, just reschedule, but maintain an overall goal date to achieve, after all this is supposed to be helping you ultimately finish a project. Look at your past projects and the time they took to gauge how much time you need for a new project. For example, a short story, magazine article, or a poem for an anthology are going to take less time than a full novel.

To can further breakdown the deadline into segments:

Initial draft.

Editing.

Beta-readers.

Revisons.

More editing…

Happy writing, happy goal setting. You can do it!