A Writing Day - Set Your Goals and See Success

How do you start out the morning? As a writer, I try to get as much done in the mornings and nights as possible. In the morning, the family is getting ready for school or work. At night, they are likely sleeping or watching TV, which allows me the freedom to work on various projects.

Writing is a serious profession that is really its own frontier. There are a world of careers for writers of non-fiction, and even a good many for fiction. The key is to take each day one step at a time. This can be applied to any work, but for the purposes of this essay lets keep it to writing.

I start out the morning sipping coffee and submitting articles I wrote the past day for publication on Associated Content. On a good day, this will be done my nine o'clock, ten at the latest. I then position myself in an entirely different field; that of writing fiction. It can be hard moving away from non-fiction to fiction, but I've found I enjoy it most days. I will write 1,000 words for a novel every single day of the week. That is a priority, and a discipline to be instilled. Even on bad days of non-fiction writing this 1,000 words will get written.

Writing novels can be like shooting in the dark, but it provides a thesis for the rest of the writing day. If I'm done by ten or eleven o'clock AM working on my novel, it position me to write a minimum of ten non-fiction articles for Associated Content. It's not great, but you can see I have long-term projects and short-term projects. A novel will always be a long-term project, as they will take a few months or years to complete. A non-fiction article can be written in a day, so is obviously a short-term project.

If I can be allowed to work most of the day, those ten articles will be finished by five o'clock. What is a writer to do then? I try to take it easy, but often I find myself continuing to write articles. It's not a habit I like, but it helps pay for gas and food.

So a successful day is 1,000 words of a novel and 10 articles of non-fiction for Associated Content. Some days are better than others, but this is an average writing day for me. As a freelancer, you should position yourself for more work not only the next day, but in other venues. I try to send out one or two queries a day. This has yet to lead to a major sale, but I have gotten a few small sales from it.

Just writing for Associated Content is great, but there are plenty of magazines that are often looking for writers.

If you're having trouble with discipline, remember breaks are a friend to writers. Often a better article will be written by a refreshed mind. This doesn't mean you should spend half your day watching TV, but perhaps an escape from the writing desk is good.

Set goals as a writer and the successes will come. Writing is about patience and having a dream.