Write More in 2024: Expand the Goal
In a college writing class we were asked to describe our work. I said I write small things. Calling myself a poet felt entirely too strange. But really, it’s a pretty good description of what I write even now. Both in scope and actual word count.
This advice might seem a bit far afield coming from me. But I will be turning 50 next year. One way that I am marking the turning is in my 50 Before 50 project. 50 finished poems written between July 2022-July 2024.
This is a big enough goal that I haven’t spoken about it publicly so far. That’s exactly how much faith I had in my ability to meet this goal.
Years ago, I listened to an interview with Ted Kooser. He said that in a good year, he ended up with 12 poems, a new collection every 5 years. That seemed like a good pace to me. If if works for Ted, it must be a good goal. And that was generally the pace I kept for years.
My chapbooks, Elemental and (the forthcoming) Every Broken Year, hold 34 poems between them. At Ted’s rate, that’s 3 years of work, though these poems took longer than that to collect. But 50 felt big enough to want to celebrate, to push myself, to set an extravagant goal that I might not be able to sustain.
I made myself a chart with quarter and cross quarter days marked. We begin with Lammas, the first harvest festival because my birthday is at the end of July: Lammas, Equinox, Samhain, Solstice, Imbolc, Equinox, Beltane, Solstice. Marking these 8 festivals for 2 years with 3 poems gets us to 48. I have no idea how I’ll account for those extra 2 poems!
Every time I log the poems, I feel like I won’t be able to make it. I’m not counting published poems or even submissions. These are poems that have moved from the daily writing through a revision process. I’ve been behind a few times. But Solstice is tomorrow and I’ve got my 3 poems. Even after an autumn mostly spent getting Elemental out into the world!
Maybe 2024 is the year for you to set an audacious goal. I’d love to hear what you’ve got planned.
My writing goals for the new year are to, a) stop fussing over and revising pieces that are more than a year old and write more new things instead, and, b) try to assemble a manuscript from the poems that have piled up since A Body of Work in '21.
I love this method you are using with such a lovely goal. I turned 40 in September and decided that I want to be more comfortable with writing for myself and my own audience. I have wanted to write a book of essay style memoirs for MANY years and am finally sitting down to write it this year. I have no set timeframe in mind. I am simply taking Fridays off of homeschool to write. Sometimes it will be for my Substack and other time for the book. I began last week by making a list of potential essays. That’s as far as I have made it and it feels good.