Writing Update
Scenes Arranged: 10
Total Scenes: 54
Apparently I miscounted somewhere because 39 + 10 is not 54. Still, this is great for me. I’ve gotten through the Inciting Incident and am, thus, one eighth through the outline. That means I’ll probably land somewhere around 400 scenes total. This sounds like a lot, but each scene can be as few as 100 words. They won’t all be, obviously, but even that paltry estimate gets me half my word count. It’s exciting making progress. PLUS, I’ve figured out all the scenes that will carry my characters through to the Key Event at 25% through the book. With any luck, I’ll bust out a bunch of scenes today.
Reading Update
Vengeful: 44%
Yeah, I didn’t read much yesterday. After a long night of working Tuesday night, I was wiped out last night. Hopefully, more today.
Personal Update
The day after tomorrow is my wife and my sixth anniversary of being together and Monday is our first wedding anniversary. Plans are coming together and I can’t wait to celebrate these milestones with the love of my life, my best friend.
Discussion Topic
What is Success?
Yesterday I talked about goal setting and how setting a dream goal and mapping a plan back with small, achievable steps can get you to doing some great things.
So what does “success” on that plan look like?
It’s easy to say that success is achieving the dream goal. Sure. But if that is the only measure of success, you run the risk of disappointment. Plans change. Goals even change for heaven’s sake. When I was in high school, I was convinced I wanted to be a doctor. I chose to go to a non-district high school in order to get a jump on studying medicine. Do you know what I found out? I didn’t want to be a doctor.
Does that mean I failed, though?
This is a tricky subject. Based on my goal of becoming a doctor, yes, I failed. But instead of letting the story end there, I pivoted. I chased engineering for two years, ultimately determining that it wasn’t right for me either, so I pivoted again. Along the way I learned things about life, about these subjects, and about myself. Is all that learning failure? Of course not, you’re probably scoffing at me and you would be right. If I had chased engineering, for example, and realized I hated it, I would have been locked in with an enormous switching cost. That looks more like failure to me.
So if diversion isn’t failure, then what is success?
This is a question I’ve grappled with over the years. What I’ve come up with is this: If I attain my goal, that’s success. If I don’t but I can learn something from the experience, that’s success too. This has also helped me with goal setting. Sometimes I have hard goals like “cut your word count in half” from my last revision on Book 1. Other times, the goal is a little more ambiguous like “make it better.” With the goal in a more ethereal state, it gives me more room to evaluate my own performance upon completion of the goal.
I guess the point here is that if you want to feel successful, you have to set yourself up for success. Know yourself, learn yourself through your successes and your inevitable failures, and set your goals accordingly. And don’t be too hard on yourself. At the end of the day, we’re all human and that’s enough of an affliction without piling guilt on top.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG