Of Goals, Staying On Track, and My Favourite Scene

I am a very goal oriented writer. You may have worked this out already if you’ve ever been around my blog during NaNoWriMo season. Goals awaken the competitive side of my personality and kick me into top motivational gear. So, when I started editing Snow in the last week of January, I set myself the goal of finishing this round of edits by the end of February, which would give me about five weeks to accomplish this task. And having that goal has really spurred me on to edit almost every single day. But I’ve been finding that having a big goal, while useful for my long term vision, doesn’t help me so much with my day to day writing. I can see where I need to be in the end, but it’s hard to measure my progress in what I’m doing on a daily basis.

So one of the things I’ve done in the past week is break my big goal down into lots of little goals, by working out how many words I need to edit a day in order to be finished by the end of February (about 3k a day at this point). Having done that, it’s so much easier now to see how I’m progressing every day, and to work out where I need to be at the end of a session. And if I fall behind, I know just how much I need to make up. Plus having all those little goals pleases my goal oriented soul greatly. I’m in great need of a way to stay on track with all my creative projects, and breaking them down into a timeline of little goals is so helpful at the moment.

One of the other big pieces of progress I made this week was editing my favourite scene. It’s just a silly, fun little scene really. The two POV characters make cookies and just spend some time having fun together and bonding for the first time, but something about it makes me smile every time I read it, work on it, or just think about it. One of my big fears when I started this draft was that it wasn’t going to fit anymore and I was going to have to cut it out. I’ve spent the past couple o weeks psyching myself up for the moment when I would realise it wouldn’t fit. But so far, it’s still needed. The characters need a scene to start bonding and growing a bit of a friendship in order for the rest of the book to happen, so my little scene gets to stay for this draft. Thank goodness.

And, because I just edited my favourite scene and I’m the mood for sharing things, I thought I would share a little excerpt from the famous cookie baking scene. So here you go!

Eric’s POV: The girl still had a hold on his arm, and was dragging him along like his resistance meant nothing. For someone so small, she sure was strong. And the whole time she was talking like it was going out of style. “I love making chocolate chip cookies,” she said. “But someone told me that adding peanut butter makes them better. And then I thought, well, if peanuts and chocolate go so well together, what about fudge? And then I figured, well, if I was going to go that far, I may as well go the whole hog and make it a double chocolate peanut butter fudge cookie. That sounds like a taste explosion, right?” She ploughed on without even waiting for an answer. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to test my recipe though, and I have a feeling that today is the day.”

And before I finish this post I want to know your thoughts. I’ve been posting these weekly writing updates for nearly two months now. What do you think of them? Like them? Don’t like them? Are the weekly updates ok, or would it be better if I posted them less often? I would love to hear what you think.

So, what are you up to in your writing this week? Do you have a favourite scene in your book? If you feel like sharing/it isn’t too spoilery, what is it about? Do you make yourself daily or weekly goals, or are you more of a big picture person?