Planning Your Writing Year Without Losing It

A new year is upon us! How do you plan for your writing calendar? 

A new year shows up like a stranger at the end of the bar—attractive, mysterious and with questionable intentions. Between Christmas and New Year’s, people like to stare into that glass and make big vows. New body. New habits. New you. By February, most of those resolutions are face-down in a snowbank, clutching a color-coded planner.

Writers are no different. We’re just more articulate about failure.

Every January, someone decides that THIS is the year they’ll write every day, outline every chapter, follow a proven system, and emerge by next December with a novel that looks like it was written by Apollo and stolen by Prometheus. This is the literary version of following that Men’s Health 90-day Workout and thinking they’ll rise from the waters looking like Daniel Craig. [Women: insert your Ideal]. The plan is rooted in the best of intentions but unrealistic expectations will kill you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald gave us Gatsby, who followed Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement program with religious devotion. We know how that worked out for him. Ambition is great. Blind faith in the system is how you end up floating in a pool, wondering where it all went wrong.

So here’s my low-rent, no-seminar version of planning a writing year. It comes from nursing, not publishing, which means it’s designed to work when things are messy, human, and bleeding a little: S.M.A.R.T. goals—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound. No PowerPoint necessary.

Specific means “finish a draft,” not “write a masterpiece.”
Measurable means pages, scenes, or hours—things that exist outside your feelings.
Attainable is you factor in that thing called Life, like a job, family, food, and don’t forget pets and spouses.
Time-bound means you give it a deadline, not a lifetime.

Personally, I plan the year like a small-time heist. I focus on one or two larger projects at a time. I write them hard and fast, then put them away. My experiences in Life have taught me to communicate with precision and efficiency, which is why my style is lean, compressed, and suggestive. While the Work rests, I work on short fiction—specifically for annual story calls for Bouchercon, Bridport, Fish, and Malice. Those deadlines are predictable and keep me honest. They also keep me sharp.

Later in the year, I come back to the Work with fresh eyes. Distance does what discipline can’t. It shows you what’s alive, what’s lying, and what needs to be buried quietly behind the shed.

That’s my calendar. No daily word-count commandments. No promises to become someone else. Just steady work, strategic pauses, and enough structure to keep me from lying to myself. I am the donkey who is not Eeyore, but persists without braying.

The new year doesn’t need a grand plan. It needs one foot in front of the other, a pawprint that survives contact with reality.