New Year’s Resolution: Be Less Ambitious

In my first post I talked about how I had a list of twelve things I wanted to accomplish in 2008, and how by April it was becoming clear that most of them just weren’t going to happen, and how by September they just seemed laughable. As in, “Ha, ha, ha, I thought I’d achieve that? Ha, ha, ha…that’s rich.”

So this year, I’ve decided to be less ambitious. I have a list resolutions but I’ve decided to aim lower. So instead of the mighty 2008 goal of “Finish first draft of novel by March” (which nine months later I still haven’t done), I’m lowering the bar I set for myself. Significantly.

My writing goal for this year? Write three-sentences a day.

That’s it.

It’s actually something I’ve been doing almost every day since September. And it works really well for me, because if three-sentences is all I manage on a given day I don’t beat myself up too badly over it—the way I most certainly would if I set myself a loftier daily goal of, say, three pages a day, and then only wrote a paragraph.

When you’re trying to work and parent and still have a life, three sentences a day is manageable.

And one of the great things about sentences is that they’re cumulative. Even if you only ever wrote three sentences a day, they would still slowly add up, forming paragraphs and scenes and short stories and, before you knew it, a short-story collection or a novel.

But the best thing about the three-sentences-a-day rule is that sitting down to write three sentences tends to lead to writing more than just three sentences a day. Like this blog posting: I’ve accomplished five days of writing in fifteen minutes…and suddenly I feel like a successful overachiever.

You should try it.