Goals and Your Creative Time in 2024

Happy New Year, SCBWI Community!

As we head into 2024, and you plan your creative works ahead, consider applying the (often used in business) SMART goals tool.

If you want to nerd out on the history of SMART goals, there's a fun article on it here. But more to the point, as you look at setting goals for your writing, illustrating, and/or translating year ahead, can you make your goals:

SPECIFIC

What exactly are you hoping to achieve? A new picture book dummy? A revision of a novel? An MFA?

MEASURABLE

What are the steps to achieving your goal? Are you going to measure time invested? Words accrued? Editors researched?

ACHIEVABLE

Sometimes the "A" in the SMART acronym is shown as attainable or even assignable (a management thing), but for us, is the goal something within our power to make happen? Here's an example: Getting your book featured in the New York Times would be awesome, but it's not directly achievable by you. Pitching an agent you've researched is achievable.

RELEVANT

Maybe you want to take a class to improve a skill, or learn new software that can aid your process. Maybe you want to read 1,000 picture books to really understand how a picture book works, and what makes one sing... Keep in mind your overall vision of creating books and content for kids and/or teens as you're setting your goals. But I'd suggest not being too stringent on this. If you really want to learn how to make bread, maybe that's the thing you need to fill your creative well... and who knows, maybe you'll create a story about a character who is obsessed with tracing back the origins of their sourdough starter!

TIME BOUND

It's always fun at the start of a new year to set goals for the year ahead. But a year is a huge amount of time. It might be more effective for you to set weekly goals. Or monthly. Or, daily... Consider that without a time-constraint on your goal, it could never get to the front-burner of your attention. 

So now, take five minutes to write down one or two creative goals for 2024. And check if they're SMART.

Good luck on the adventure ahead, as we all illustrate, translate, and write on,
Lee