Sure, we’ve all heard that writing is solitary confinement. And it is. You don’t ask a friend over to watch you look out the window as you think or type smart pithy sentences, delete them, and then type something else.
But there is so much more to writing than putting words on paper; more includes marketing and publicizing your work. That’s where friends come in. Not to do the market research for you or to line up speaking engagements. No, their job is to hold you accountable.
You can only manage what you measure, so before you can be held accountable, you must set goals. Putting them in writing makes them tangible.
I’ve had three goal partners for over 20 years. We meet Wednesday at lunch in a local restaurant and stay an hour talking writing. We share markets, and we set goals. Long term, medium term, and short term.
Our goals are realistic. I can’t set a goal to get an agent. That’s out of my control. I can set a goal to query three agents a week. That action is mine alone. The next Wednesday, someone will ask, “Have you met your query quota?”
Having to be accountable to others keeps me working forward.
I also have two writing buddies in my wine and whine group. We meet at each other’s homes every three months and spend the night. We live hours apart, but we make the effort to meet because it inspires us and keeps us goal oriented. We sometimes read our work aloud if we want help, and we always share our goals and write them in the official wine and whine Moleskine® notebook. We read the minutes of our overnights each time we meet and see if we’ve kept our intentions.
There are times we fail to meet our goals; but more often we succeed. Sharing our successes makes them sweeter, and sharing our failures halves the sting.
You don’t need to have a goal partner who is a writer. As long as you are like-minded in moving forward in your chosen careers, any person you feel a kinship for will do fine. The important thing is to trust that person to have your best interests at heart as you work toward your goals. And in that way, you really don’t have to work alone.