The end of a year can be a quiet time for reflection and for many writers, it’s a time to think about what you had set out to accomplish in the span of twelve months. For many of us, this can be a disappointing realization when you find that a year has wrapped and you haven’t produced what you had hoped.

While it’s easy to feel down about what didn’t happen, the upcoming New Year presents a fresh opportunity to tackle your ambition. But diving in with the same approach has a large probability of producing the same results. So as we roll through the holidays and into resolution season, let’s talk about how you can not only let go of the bummer that is missing your target goals, but how you can align yourself to new ones that fit your life, your mood and your intentions for your writing career.

Take stock of what you did accomplish

The first step, before you do anything else, should be to take inventory of what you DID accomplish. It may not have been all you set out to do, but odds are, you made progress anyways. Whether that meant establishing a consistent routine or you got to the half way point of your intended writing destination, that’s worth celebrating!

Ask yourself, did I move the needle compared to this time last year? And unless you did absolutely nothing at all, you can pat yourself on the back for what you achieved.

Before we move on, even if you did “nothing” I bet you actually did do something. Maybe you thought about the plot of your novel and made several notes. Perhaps you took a course or read some inspiring books that taught you something about your craft. Even if you did none of those things, what did the rest of your time look like? Did you spend quality time with your kids? Advance your career? Move to a new city? Even if you felt like your whole year was a mess, odds are you learned some lessons. Those lessons could have taught you fortitude, resilience, empathy, patience or courage. All things you can use and apply to your writing, either thematically or in the actual act of writing.

Whatever the previous year held, write down what you got out of it. And then translate that into how you can use that momentum in the year to come.

For example:

My word count goal was 100,000 and I wrote 60,000.

First of all, that means you are 60% of the way to your goal with only 40% left to accomplish. And maybe you spent a lot of time editing and learned from that experience. You can congratulate yourself on all the skills you accumulated and be excited that in the year ahead, you have what it takes to hit 100,000.

Writers are so hard on themselves and we tend to take very little time to reflect on all the positives. So spend some time in gratitude and positive reflection so you’re entering the new year with an optimistic mindset.

Get honest about what didn’t work

Now I said honest… not mean.

The truth is, in every area of our lives, there is room for improvement. And in our writing life, we can assess the areas that aren’t serving us and leave that behind. Whether you resisted getting a second set of eyes on your work or you spent too much time agonizing over what you had already written rather than writing more, get super clear about what’s holding you back and plan a new path forward.

Only write when you feel inspiration? Force yourself into the chair for fifteen minutes, regardless of whether the muse is present or not.

Saving your writing for when you have “free time” only to have no time for it at all? Knock out some words first thing in the morning before the rest of life has the chance to get in the way.

Feel like the project you worked on just isn’t clicking, no matter how much you tweak it? Try to begin something fresh.

When something isn’t working, don’t beat yourself up for it. Just pivot to get yourself out of the rut.

Check in with your goals

Maybe it’s just me… but I can tend to have a “set it, then forget it” relationship with my New Year’s resolutions. I’m always in a general stage of writing and wanting to complete a project, but those hyper-specific goals I tend to dabble in at the beginning of the year kind of fade.

As you prepare to set your sights on something new, reorient yourself with the way you have goal-set in the past. Have you adhered to it? Is it working for you?

I can completely understand the goal of “write 1,000 words a day,” but I’ve found year over year, that’s just not really how I operate. This year, in order to complete the first draft of my third novel, I committed to bringing my laptop with me to the parent pick up line at my kids’ school and showed up an hour early. I was that parent in the front of the line. This was so much better for my progress than a word count goal. I was isolated, quiet, and had spotty service. So it was just me and my Word doc for an hour a day, five days a week.

If you didn’t reach your goals for the year… maybe it’s because you’re goal setting in a way that doesn’t work for you.

There are a lot of ways to get to where you’re trying to go, so find the vehicle that gets you there. It doesn’t have to work for someone else as long as it works for you.

Assess your reality

I tend to start my year off with pie-in-the-sky ideas about what I can accomplish while completely disregarding all other aspects of my life that I’m responsible for. As a mom of five, a full-time editorial director for two sites, a person who tries her best to eat healthy, exercise and live in a clean house, my day is pretty packed already. So as fun as it is to daydream about 10 solid writing hours a week, the reality (kid illness, work deadlines, my resistance to meal prepping of any sort despite how much I know it helps) tends to conflict with such a lofty goal.

Lately, I’ve taken to using ChatGPT in my author life more, not for my writing, but in a personal assistant capacity. So I’ll enter my non-negotiable time constraints, as well as things like target amount of sleep and time for play and rest with my family and let the robots do the work for conjuring up ideas about my schedule. It can be hard to see the forest for the trees, and tools like AI can help you get a bird’s-eye view on what might be a feasible writing cadence. Now of course, you can make tweaks from there that dial up or dial back your writing time, but it is helpful to see a calculated approach to your routine. A tool like AI can even calculate things like “What time of the idea is ideal for what tasks?” If you’re in a research phase, it may feel like there is an optimal time for that that is different from the creativity required for first drafts.

The point is, get super clear on what your reality is, not what you wish it would be. Your goals can be accomplished regardless of what your life looks like, but it may be on a different timeline than you’re hoping. If you aim too high, you could burn out or feel inadequate which could stall your pace even more than going slow and steady in alignment with your lifestyle.

Release yourself from time constraints

Too often, our goals come from a place of urgency. Maybe even immediacy. We all want our success to come now… or sooner. So we tend to set goals that reflect our own impatience rather than ones that will serve us in the long run. Detach yourself from self-imposed deadlines or ideas about when you “should” have something accomplished by. There are A LOT of writers out there who feel they have missed the boat if they haven’t written their book by [arbitrary age/date/milestone]. In all likelihood, that is a deadline that is both meaningless and destructive.

If you’re setting a deadline merely because you feel anxious or perhaps even desperate to move into a next chapter, it’s bound to create unnecessary pressure.

Check out Clare Chambers’ interview where she discusses feeling like her career had flopped and then getting her big win after the age of fifty.

And also Elizabeth Bass Parman‘s tips on why it’s never too late to publish and how she’s happy to be debuting at 63.

Now, obviously publishers are going to have deadlines and it’s okay to hope for certain successes at different stages of your life, but don’t let your own internal (and quite frankly, arbitrary) clock create chaos where it needn’t be. Free yourself and your goals from heavy expectations and only set hard deadlines if it actually improves your productivity, otherwise, it’s just creating tension where it doesn’t need to be.

As you step into another year of writing, be kind to yourself, but also believe that what you want is possible and using a little honesty and a lot of grace, create a set of goals that feels good, produces results and has the capacity to stand up to life’s unpredictable nature.