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Are you part of the select group of people actually achieving writing goals? Or did you give up on them back in February?
Every January, writers everywhere make the same promises. Finish the novel. Submit to 12 literary magazines. Build a newsletter audience. Write every single day without fail.
Now it’s May, and you might not even remember those promises you made to yourself four months ago. You probably believe that “real” writers must have some discipline gene the rest of us are missing.
After more than two decades of coaching writers, I can tell you: that gene doesn’t exist. What exists is a small set of practices that separate writers who finish from writers who keep starting.
Here are the six that matter most:
1. Make your goal smaller than feels reasonable
When writers tell me they want to write for at least an hour a day, I usually suggest they aim for 15 minutes instead. Their faces fall — that time commitment sounds small and pathetic. But here’s the thing: a goal you hit every day for a year can produce a book or a dissertation. A goal you hit for three weeks before burning out never produces anything.
The math always favours the small, sustainable target.
The trick is to set the bar low enough that you’ll clear it on your worst day — the day you have a sinus infection, a difficult meeting and a child who didn’t sleep. If your goal works only on good days, it’s not really a goal. It’s a fantasy.
2. Replace willpower with environment
Most writers try to muscle through resistance using willpower. But willpower is a finite, depleting resource. By 2 p.m., yours is mostly gone, which is why the writing you planned to do “after the kids are in bed” rarely happens.
Instead, change your environment to do the work for you. Put the manuscript on your desk before you go to sleep, open to the page where you’ll start. Charge your laptop overnight in your writing spot. Set the coffee maker the night before. Make starting easier than not starting.
Writers who succeed don’t have more willpower. They’ve engineered their lives so they need less of it.
3. Track the action, not the outcome
If your goal is “publish a book,” you can work hard for years and feel like you’ve accomplished nothing — because the outcome lives in the future, dependent on factors outside your control (agents, editors, the market, luck).
Instead, track the daily action that leads to the outcome. Did I write today? Yes or no. That’s a question with a clean answer, and the answer accumulates into something real.
Buy a paper calendar. Mark an X on every day you write. Don’t break the chain. This sounds simplistic, but the visual evidence of your own consistency is one of the most motivating forces I know.
4. Schedule writing like a doctor’s appointment
If I asked you to skip your dental cleaning to deal with email, you’d refuse. Yet writers regularly skip their writing for exactly that reason. The difference is that the dentist holds you accountable; with writing, it’s all up to you.
Block writing time in your calendar. Treat it as non-negotiable. Tell people, “I have a commitment from 7 to 8 a.m.” You don’t have to specify that the commitment is to yourself.
5. Find an accountability partner
Research on goal achievement consistently shows that the single highest predictor of follow-through is reporting your progress to someone else.
I provide that service to members of my Get It Done writing group. (Admission is closed until Aug. 1, but email me to get on the waiting list now if you’re interested!)
If you don’t want a group, pick someone you know. Trade with them — and ask about their goals, too.
6. Forgive yourself faster
Here’s the paradox: writers who recover quickly from missed days finish more often than writers who try harder not to miss days at all.
When you skip a writing session, the temptation is to spiral. I’m not really a writer. I have no discipline. Why do I even bother? That story takes longer to recover from than the missed day itself. The work, meanwhile, is sitting there waiting for you, indifferent to your self-flagellation.
Skip a day? Fine. Just don’t skip two in a row. That’s the rule.
The boring truth
Writers who reach their goals aren’t more talented than those who don’t. They aren’t more inspired or more blessed by the muse. They’ve simply made peace with the unglamorous work of showing up, in small repeatable ways, on the days when they don’t feel like it.
Reaching your goals doesn’t require a dramatic transformation of who you are. It just requires a few quiet adjustments to how you arrange your days.
Start there. The rest follows.
Something I’m loving right now…
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My video podcast last week addressed whether there’s currently a market for historical fiction. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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Are you achieving writing goals in 2026? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by May 31/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
