In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* How to (and How Not to) Set Goals: Part 1
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“I know I am weird, setting up a challenge I was almost certain I would fail at. But unlike many of you, I have no fear of failure and can use failure to move forward. The short story challenge was a perfect example.” Dean Wesley Smith, on his previous ‘big’ challenge (see Of Interest)
How to (and How Not to) Set Goals
Note: This is a two-parter. I didn’t want to split it into two, but it was just too long for a single post. Please get a cuppa and follow along today and tomorrow. I think you’ll be glad you did.
I seldom disagree with Dean Wesley Smith. The guy made me aware of Heinlein’s Rules and writing into the dark, and for that I will be forever grateful to him. However….
Setting yourself up for failure is never a good idea.
As good as ‘failing to success’ is, it’s also depressing.
Success, on the other hand, is empowering. And success also encourages you to reach higher.
Of course, failing to successfully reach a goal or challenge or continue a streak is the eventual and inevitable outcome for anyone who dares to try something they’ve never done before. At some point, for whatever reason, you’ll miss your goal or fail in your challenge or your streak will end.
But the FOCUS of setting a goal or challenge should never be “I know I’m gonna fail,” or even “I know I’ll probably fail, but at least I’ll fail to success.”
In every case, the focus of setting a goal or challenge should be positive, not negative. The focus of setting a goal or challenge should be to achieve success.
The challenge Dean set for himself for the 2025 calendar year was to write a new short story every day for the whole year.
That was a very ambitious challenge, and if his focus had been on actually achieving that, it would be a remarkable challenge to set whether or not he succeeded.
But I suspect from the very beginning, Dean’s focus was to see how far he’d get before he failed. In other words, he never expected to succeed and end the year with 365 short stories.
So when it came time to give it up and end the challenge at only 105 short stories, he saw that as “failing to success.” After all, he had 105 short stories that hadn’t existed before.
I applaud him for that productivity. But I’m two thumbs down on him for flat-out anticipating and welcoming failure from the very beginning.
All of that is to say when you want to set a goal or challenge for yourself, it should be realistic.
I’m not saying your goal or challenge should be easy. It shouldn’t. In fact, if your goal or challenge is easy to reach, it isn’t a valid goal or challenge.
To Set a Valid Goal or Challenge, Try This
One of my favorite goals or challenges is the daily fiction word count goal.
Why? Because the words can go anywhere. They can go into a novel or a short story. Doesn’t matter.
What? It doesn’t matter?
No, where the words go doesn’t matter.
As I keep saying, WHAT you write doesn’t matter: That is, the individual novel or story doesn’t matter.
The fact that where the words go doesn’t matter will have this positive effect: You won’t consider the novel or story ‘important,’ and therefore you won’t worry about it and freeze up as a result of worrying about it.
Instead you’ll go on happily writing, eagerly anticipating what will happen next as your characters’ story unfolds.
By the very fact of challenging himself to write a new short story every day for a whole year, Dean effectively set out to eat a whole elephant instead of focusing on taking one bite at a time.
In other words, he made each of those short stories “important” instead of just focusing on putting new words on the page every day.
I’ll wager that had Dean’s challenge been to write 3000 words per day, even if he still focused only on short fiction, he would’ve turned out far more than 105 short stories on the year.
And if he’d challenged himself to write 3000 words per day and not limited himself to the short form, there’s no telling how many novels, novellas, and short stories he might’ve turned out during the year.
His focus would have been on putting new words on the page (writing) instead of on the individual stories.
Of course, he knows (or has known) all of that. So he’s doing what he does, and that’s fine. After all, he’s Dean Wesley Smith.
But teaching beginning or early stage writers that “failing to success” is just as good as succeeding is not all right. Because it isn’t the same thing. At all.
“Failing to success” isn’t even a valid stand-in for success. Failing to success is only a way to salvage something, to snatch a minor victory from the jaws of defeat.
PS: Be sure to see the second post in Of Interest today too. In it, Dean seems to bear out what I wrote above.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Update on My Last Year’s Challenge
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 910
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 910
Writing of Blackwell Ops 53: Jack Striker | The Next Level
Day 1…… 2035 words. To date………… 2035
Day 2…… 2217 words. To date………… 4252
Day 3…… 3751 words. To date………… 8003
Day 4…… 2218 words. To date………… 10221
Day 5…… 2181 words. To date………… 12402
Day 6…… 1673 words. To date………… 14075
Fiction for December……………………… 14075
Fiction for 2025…………………………… 768722
Nonfiction for December.………………… 12640
Nonfiction for 2025………………..……… 277770
2025 consumable words………………… 1038923
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 18
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 36
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 122
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29