Powerful Goals

In each of my classes, we set and check in about weekly. Regular commitment to your goals, public declaration of them and frequent tracking of them all support achievement of them. This practice, though, has a few requirements:

1) Have a goal in your heart that really matters to you, that underlies these weekly goals. Do you want to write a book? Do you want, simply, miraculously, to have a writing life? Do you want to be fluid on the page, fluent in the translation of your thoughts, experiences and imagination to the page? Are words your medium? Do you want to be published? Do you love the community of writers and want to be part of it? Do you want the discipline of committing to your art? Do you want to make important the practice of creativity in your daily life? Do you want to write more than you do? Do you want to reconnect with the pleasure that writing once gave you, the wonder of capturing and creating pictures in words?

2) Use your weekly goals to say yes to your writing, yes to your deeper goal. One of the roles of the creative writing teacher, in my experience, is to be that which you resist, so that you stop resisting yourself. When I give a writing exercise, I always say, all you *have* to do is write. The only way to get it wrong is not to write. Because sometimes the best sentences come out of the urge to refuse, to say no to the exercise and following your rebellion in another direction. And when we do not have a teacher to resist, we creative types often resist ourselves. And if your rebel refuses to write because you’ve decided you want to write, because you’ve committed to writing, where is that getting you? Better to capture your rebel’s objections and fears right on the page than give in and abandon your deeper goal.

3) Explore your weekly goals as you take steps toward this deeper goal. Figuring out your ideal daily and weekly goal takes experimentation, and your ideal goal will shift as you work through the various stages of a project and in other ways. But you are looking to fall into a groove, a simple and boring and easy-to-remember goal. Once your habit is incredibly boring and uncomplicated (I have a student who writes 1000 words a week almost religiously: “Wash, rinse and repeat,” he says each week; I have students whose goal is to write every day, or to write a least one sentence a day), the drama, fascination and complications arise from somewhere else: the writing itself!

4) Don’t assess each day for inspiration before you sit down to write. Imagine if you woke up in the morning, felt tired, and decided as a result of this feeling of fatigue NOT to make yourself coffee or take a shower or stretch–whatever you do to wake up? The thing about a habit–and you can fake this until it’s true–is that you do not think, should I do this now? Should I breathe in? Should I eat breakfast? Should I brush my teeth? Should I unlock my car before I try to get into it? You do not weigh your feelings, push around like a doctor checking your stomach to see if there are tender spots. You just do it. And guess what? The shower or coffee or stretch begins to wake you up. And the writing habit inspires you. It is backwards to say, I only write when I am inspired. It becomes truer to say, I am only inspired when I write.

5) Stay in touch with your larger, deeper goals as you trust the actions that bring them into being. Remind yourself that these simple habits, these daily repetitions, are the heart of that dream. This is one of the reasons I confess that I love reading about writers’ writing lives in books like Meredith Maran’s Why We Write and Daniel Alarcon’s The Secret Miracle.  The daily life of a writer is strange. We sit down and make things up or mine memory or capture ideas and experiences on the page. We have a particular relationship with silence, with the voices in our heads, with not knowing.

Someone once told me, “Not knowing is a state of grace.” I understand this now much more than I did at the time. It’s partly about understanding that we, each of us, are not the terminals, not the end point or the start, but a throughway, a conduit, a canal, through which flows something larger, greater, wilder than we can conjure on our own.

When we know we don’t know, we are pressed close to the truth of existence. Is that uncomfortable, infuriating, terrifying? Sure. Is this, perhaps, the reason we resist the daily habit, cling to inspiration before we throw ourselves over the abyss? Here’s the thing: Inspiration is not the Tarzan vine on which you fly, not the shabby hang glider you wait for like a taxi–it’s the sky through which you travel when you make the leap, wingless and afraid, and it’s as strong and bouyant as a net. It will be there–in all directions–if you fall or if you fly.