The common creative writing advice - set big goals and break them down into milestonesįor as long as I can remember, I’ve aspired to write. Let me explain, using a bit of personal history, the anecdotes of writer Anne Lamott, and the psychology of motivation. The other, looking back, builds confidence and motivation with each success. One approach risks, looking forward, demotivating us with each step. This difference in framing may seem subtle, but has a rather profound outcome. Instead of looking forward, toward our goals, with a daily ‘stepping stone’ of milestones before us, I think wonder if we should be looking backwards at each moment to moment act of creativity. This might seem like a powerful and pragmatic idea, but I’ve realised it’s the exact opposite of how we should think about framing motivation for creative tasks. My memories of childhood and school advice is generally, if we have a difficult task to achieve, we should break our target (like writing 70,000 words) into smaller daily milestones. Especially creative goals, like creative writing, where the end is often ambiguous to us, even as we work.
I’m not offering this number as a boast, but an example of a burst of creative work that got me It got me thinking about the approaches we take to helping motivate the achievement of challenging goals. Looking at my notes, I realised this 70k month was a landmark personal achievement the most productive work month on a project that started back in December 2017. This burst of progress helped me take something that was only partially complete and advance it all the way to a ’rough’ first draft. Recently, while working on a fiction project that has been part of my life for some time, I managed to write a grand total of 71,762 words in a single month.
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