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8 Reasons to Attend a Writing Boot Camp

December 13, 2018 in Writing for Life with 0 Comments

Often, at the end of the year, we writers start strategizing about our plans for the New Year. That’s why I’ve been running this series of blog posts on strategic planning. It’s important. Time is precious, demands on our time are numerous, and we want great results in our efforts to improve as a writer in the least amount of time.

At least I do. I hate wasting time. I try to make the most out of every minute I spend on my career, whether it is researching, writing, attending conferences, teaching, or brainstorming. I can’t rush my ideas, and sometimes it takes me months to pull a novel together in my head before I’m ready to write. But I can be efficient with all the other aspects of my writing life.

Over the years I’ve attended a lot of writers’ conferences. I’ve also attended some intensive one-day and one-week writing workshops. I always learn a lot at conferences, but, hands down, I learn the most at intensive events. Also what I learn at those focused intensive workshops made the greatest impact on my skills as a writer. Continue Reading…

Brainstorming Tactics for Your Strategic Plan

December 10, 2018 in Writing for Life with 1 Comment

In continuation from last week’s post reviewing the key points of strategic planning, we’re going to look at how to formulate a simple, approachable strategy to help you reach those writing goals and big dreams you have for your career.

We took a look at what a writing vision considers: what you want to be, what you want to have, and what you want to do. If you haven’t laid down that vision, come up with sample statements similar to the ones in that post.

Now that you have listed all those things you hope to achieve by the end of 2019, you’ll want to come up with a clear game plan so you can reach those goals. Set up benchmarks for the various steps you need to take to get to the finish line. Once you figure out the steps, you can then decide how long it will take you to complete each step.

One great way to figure this all out is to brainstorm all your ideas. I have numerous posts on ways writers can brainstorm using mind maps, so consider using it for strategic planning as well!

Get out that big piece of tag board and your markers and start listing all the dreams and goals you have. You can then draw lines (as discussed in the previous posts) to the milestones you need to reach to get to each goal. And with each milestone, you can connect all the little tasks you have to accomplish to make that milestone. Continue Reading…

Breaking Down the Strategy for Writing Success

December 3, 2018 in Writing for Life with 2 Comments

We’re continuing our re-visitation of some posts I wrote years ago on strategic planning for writers. I highly recommend that, at the end of every year, you assess and reassess your writing career. Look at how far you’ve come, what goals and milestones you’ve reached, and what goals still lie ahead.

To reach your ultimate goals that speak of a successful writing career, you have to break the process down into chunks.

In the last two posts (start here) I introduced the components writers need in order to formulate a practical, usable strategic plan for their writing career. Instead of wandering aimlessly, writers can envision what they want their careers to look like in a year, two years, even five years, and reach a specific destination: the realization of their vision.

Last week I looked at the first element needed to consider in strategic planning: the vision itself. Hopefully you filled in the blanks for all those vision statements and now are ready to tackle the next step: creating your strategy. I’m also going to touch on milestones a bit here and continue on in next week’s post. Continue Reading…