Planning My Year as a Writer

How I try to control what I can — and relax about the things I can’t

I freely confess that many of the activities I do with my online writing school are self-serving. I hire teachers who I want to learn from, and bring in speakers that I want to hear. I lead writing games sessions on a weekly basis because it helps me generate flash fiction. Accordingly, as my first selfish act of 2024, I scheduled two 90 minute “let’s plan the year” sessions for the school community, knowing it’d force me to be better about it myself. Overall, I’ve found a little bit of planning goes a long way into steering my year in the direction I’d like to take. I share what I did and the results of the sessions in the hopes it may be useful to other people.

I don’t usually set pre-work, but this time I did, sending out this list of questions for people to write out for themselves ahead of time. When you make lists like this, it’s always from your own perspective, and next time I do this, I will include a note saying many items may not be applicable, depending on who’s filling them out. This time, I had one person worried that the session wasn’t right for them, and another who got so depressed looking at the list that they bowed out of the session. That tells me I can and should make this list a bit more one-size-fits-all. But it was a good start.