Maintaining Accountability

If you have ever participated in NaNoWriMo, you have developed some feelings about the word count tracker. Maybe it has become your greatest motivator. Maybe you try to hide from it like a toddler with scissors who just got caught cutting their own hair. We all have different reasons for the way we feel about the NaNo Tracker, but I think it is the sort of thing that we should consider beyond this month.

You see, love or hate, the NaNo Tracker keeps us accountable for the writing we actually did. And, if you have writing buddies, you know that they also have access to your progress, and that this may be contributing to your willingness to continue to update or hide.

There is a temptation, when it comes to writing, to falsify the progress we are making. Some of it is absolutely invisible work, thinking and brainstorming and researching and solidifying that has to take place in order to have a strong story. Playing around with mock-ups of covers is probably less helpful. And talking about how you have an idea for a story over and over may work in the long run as people question how your book is coming, knowing and doing are two different things.

There is a necessity to have a solid plan of accountability.

Part of the problem may be your tendency. Gretchen Rubin explains that the tendency is how well we meet or disregard our own expectations or the expectations of others. I think knowing which part of the framework you fall in will help you better understand what kind of accountability works for you. Please take the free quiz here.

Regardless of where you ended up, it will be difficult to succeed at this writing gig without a plan of consistency. For this part, there are a few steps.

Track Your Progress

My dad was a high school athletics coach for a long time, guiding youth on football fields and basketball courts and around the track. He always said his favorite sport to coach when it came to dealing with parents was track and field – the numbers didn’t lie. Someone was either a top runner, or they weren’t. They either cleared the height of the high jump or they didn’t. While having a steady time to write every day is important for creating a habit, tracking what actually got accomplished during the writing time is essential.

Fellow WITS contributor Jamie Raintree has a great resource for the people who like to track words. Her Writing and Revision Tracker is a thing of organizational beauty, and the 2018 version is available now, with some new bells and whistles I’m very eager to play with.

Perhaps the techie stuff leads you down the path of distraction (or frustration). With the customization options of bullet journals, you can consider exactly what you’d like to track.

Report Your Progress

If a writer produces so many words and no one knows…

Ah, forget it.

Most people are more likely to hit their goals if they have to tell someone about it. A few years ago, I had the good fortune to join a critique group that meets every two weeks. That means that every two weeks, we have to take ownership as to whether or not we have been writing. It’s just enough time that a bad day (or two) doesn’t derail anything and frequent enough that writing has to stay at least a little at the forefront of our minds.

There are also people who have had success with a single accountability partner. I recently stumbled on an article that shared the idea of a friendtor – someone who was a friend first, but also has common interests, passions and pursuits. In this, the author suggests a 30/30/30 system. The interested pair schedule a time regularly when they can get together, and spend the first 30 minutes getting caught up on life stuff, the second 30 minutes of one person sharing work and progress and hiccups and derailments while the other listens, then the last 30 minutes switching. I have a friend who I do this with in person, and a sibling who I engage with over the phone. Why two? The first is who I can share my creative process with, is someone who can share hers with me. My sibling is very goal and marketing driven, which means that on a semi-regular basis, I get to think about being a creative and a solopreneur, and what I have been doing to succeed at both, and where I have experienced setbacks.

Celebrate Your Progress

Finishing something warrants celebration. Not all out nutso parties, but a group of people with whom the accomplishments from “I have a new idea” to “The End” can be met with praise and joy. My writing group also has an online group through Facebook messenger where we can share and, as necessary, be the beneficiary of sticker and/or gif parades. It seems small, but knowing there is a group who is excited is that small propulsion that allows us to keep going, to keep creating. I have also found these kinds of people in WFWA and as part of The Motivated Writer group.

Finally, these kinds of accomplishments absolutely have a place in your social media life, and experts even say the way to Be The Gateway and honestly engage with an online audience is to Show Your Work.