Your Writing Goals are Unrealistic

A Vampire grabs you by the neck and leans to partake in their meal. Locked in place, you struggle, flailing in futility. Fangs puncture your skin, and shooting pain radiates through your body, amplified by vertigo and the chill of bloodloss. Your life, your soul, drains from your body and you pass out.

This Vampire doesn't kill you, though.

It leaves you to replenish your reserves so it can feast another day. Every day, in fact. Except two days a week, when you’re too drained to taste good. Work can feel like a hungry bloodsucker that would consume all the energy you have without remorse. Travelling for work can feel like Count Dracula himself was upon you, like writing was impossible. He caught me this week when I went up to a factory hours away from home, to work in an unfamiliar area with unfamiliar people and equipment. Regardless, we’re going to find a way around ol’ Dracula and make the impossible possible.

We’ll begin with my writing plans for the week and the obstacles I faced. Then we’ll take a critical look at my plans, and find a way to adjust them to deal with the obstacles. That way, this Blog will be a useful tool to apply whenever Dracula attacks you.

What I planned

I planned to write a little every evening, whether it be plotting my upcoming novels or writing this Blog.

Obstacles

1. Travelling for hours

2. Working on arrival

3. Learning tons of new information all day at the new location

4. Navigating different working conditions and cultures

5. Staying in an unfamiliar place

6. Trying to write with no energy

Obstacles 1 through 5 culminate in 6: Trying to write with no energy. By time I got to my room this past Monday, all I wanted to do was sleep, especially considering that my GPS wasted an extra hour taking me through dirt roads. Still, I stayed strong, got something to eat, and tried to write. Plotting was not going to happen with a tired, frustrated brain, so I started this Blog and wrote that Vampire paragraph. Not much, but you have to take the small wins. This was just day 1, after all, and I was so tired, a Vampire might have actually drank my blood.

Unfortunately, the rest of the week didn’t get easier. Obstacles 3 and 4 turned up the heat as the days went on: learn more, get involved more, do more. Tuesday evening I ended up noting in this Blog that I failed to write anything. I felt like a failure. That I was never going to have enough time to write anything meaningful ever again. It was too depressing to note my failure on Wednesday, so I didn’t. Same for Thursday, and Friday after traveling home. It’s Saturday now, and though I want to lie down and rest, I have to write this Blog. I have to write something. Thankfully, my work area at home is conducive to that. It’s an anti-obstacle, if you will. Tell me on discord if you want to know more about my setup, but for now, back to making the impossible possible.

Issues with my plans

Unrealistic expectations. I was away from the setup I’d been writing at for years, far from home, and learning tons of other information every day. It is not realistic to expect productivity after working hours.

Yet.

How to adjust my plans to work with the obstacles

1. Obviously: reduce my expectations.

It is not so simple. Trying to do that this week made me feel like I was giving up. How many times do you have to reduce your expectations until you’re not writing anymore? Well, I can’t answer that for you. Reducing expectations is an act of compromise. It’s up to you to decide how much you’re willing to compromise. Personally, I am willing to go quite far, so long as obstacles 3, 4, and 5 subside over time. If they do so, I will have more energy in my evenings (in theory) to write (and perhaps even draw/post during travelling weeks—but let’s rein those expectations in for now, shall we)

Problem solved? For now, it seems so. My writing plan is now tempered by experience. Your’s can be, too, if you follow the structure of this Blog:

1. Write down writing plans.

2. Write down obstacles

3. Question whether plans are realistic in the face of those obstacles. Could these obstacles create any other issues?

4. Adjust plans and compromise for realistic productivity

This way, you don’t set yourself up for failure. I took a dangerous walk down that path this week, and it really put a strain on my mental health, especially with query rejections coming in and the other stress factors in life like health, the pandemic, family, finances, etc. Oh, and work itself! Writing this Blog helped me consider the long-term and—heaven forbid—what makes me happy. I hope reading it helps you do the same.

If you have to write, you have to write, Dracula be damned. Fight for the time, even if that battle is with your own brain.

Let’s make the world a better place, one slain bloodsucker at a time.

Reece