New Year, New Writing You – 2018 Installment

By Kasie Whitener

Last year, I had the first blog of 2017 and I used it to inspire myself to set some writing goals. This is the link to that post if you’d like to review it.

Here’s how I did on my writing goals:

• Find an agent for the vampire novel. Nyet. The thing was a hot mess most of the year and I only just figured out what’s wrong with it. Not agent-ready.     
• Find a publisher for the GenX novel. Nyet. I did get some valuable feedback and a semi-yes from a small press before the press closed its doors to new submissions. I also learned it stayed in consideration for a long time with a different small press before being rejected. Thanks for sending it to us and please submit again. 
• Write ten new stories. Nyet. I wrote about half that and submitted even fewer.

I said at the time that these were “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals,” and they were absolutely career-changing, had they come about. How’s that for building in an escape clause?

What I did accomplish in 2017 was to present at a prestigious literary festival on the topic of funerals – a much-needed examination of a critical scene in the GenX novel. I also applied for and won a scholarship to the Big Dream Conference held by our parent organization, the South Carolina Writers’ Association. In my application, I said the conference could really move the needle on my writing life. And it did.

What I learned is that I’m at a new level in my writing career. Gone are the novice-writer needs like learning the publishing industry and learning to take feedback. I’m now in a middle plane of writer’s career where I know how to do the work and just have to do it.

My bestie, Jodie Cain Smith, offered advice on one of my stories this year that summed up my entire writing career right now. She said, “Be willing to dig deeper.”

It’s not enough to play at writing. If you want this, you have to dig deeper.

Here’s the 2018 strategy:

• ·       Write every day. Something. Anything. Whether it’s for work, a blog, or fiction. Don’t let yourself go to bed without writing something. The more I write, the better I get. So, write more.
• ·      Submit every week. Query an agent, send off to a publisher, enter a contest, submit a story to journal. Every week you have to put yourself out there. That’s 52 submissions this year. Something will get published.
• ·         Revise one work per month. Focus revision on a single piece and work that piece until the month is over. At month end, done or not, move on to something else. You don’t have to finish revising all in one go. But you do have to focus.

In my writing life, it’s time to dig deeper and do the work. What will you do in your writing life in 2018?