A Year of Focus for this Writer

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. It’s also the first IWSG for 2023! I can't believe we're already in the new year! It seems to come faster each year especially as you get older. As we all know, a new year is a time for resolutions, and this month’s IWSG optional question of the month kind of addresses that. That question is: Do you have a word of the year? Is there one word that sums up what you need to work on or change in the coming year? . . .

I thought about what a word of the year might be for me and thought that word was “speed”. I’ve always been a slow writer due to having ADHD. But then speed is something I've worked on all my life so I don't think that's a problem to be resolved as much as it is to be worked around. So, then I thought that what I really need is "efficiency" for my word of the year. Well, I’m always trying to make my writing more efficient. It's true that I maybe just need a little more organization and commitment to schedules rather than flexing them so much. So, I thought some more about it and realised that the problem to be resolved is really "focus", and so that is my writer's word for 2023. So, my, um, focus will be on "focus". 

What I mean by focus is by giving more time to fewer but more important writing projects. Some of us writers and artists have so many ideas and so take on too many different projects to the point of, as they say, spreading ourselves too thin. We take on too many writing-related activities at one time, sometimes even thinking we'll get more done more quickly by doing so. However, that can really defeat the purpose. For example, throughout 2022 I was trying too much to: work on improving the technicalities of my blog, such as going back to every post and image to revise the SEO; make videos to promote my writing; promote my work on social media; and looking for images for my blog and newsletter. I was giving too much attention to all of these things and so was both shrinking my fiction writing time down as well as, ironically, my time to work on these other projects. So, even when I gave equal amount of time to each  of these activities, I wouldn't get any of them done because I was doing too many of them at once. 

To resolve the problem of taking on too much at one time, I'm going to put these other projects in the back seat. So, I’ll spend less time on them and focus more on putting my book of short fiction together and producing my weekly blog posts and monthly newsletter. These last two help me give people status of my fiction projects so they’ll see what progress I’ve made on them. I want to get things done faster and in a more timely manner, but simply writing and revising faster isn't going to do it. Focusing on the most important activities I believe will.

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What's your word of the year to help you in your writing? Do you have other new year's resolutions to improve your writing productivity and reaching your writing goals?

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: Jemima Pett, Debs Carey, Kim Lajevardi, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and T. Powell Coltrin! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels! 

Until next time . . .