Set Your Writing Goals by Rochelle Melander

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it. —W. Clement Stone

Effective teachers enter the classroom with a set of learning objectives—information, techniques, or skills that they expect the students to learn by the end of the class. The objectives direct the daily practice, giving the teacher and the students something to work towards.

Writers need learning objectives, too. We need to vision:

*What we want our writing career to look like.

*What ideas we want to explore in our writing

*What products we want to create—poems, articles, short stories, books.

*What writing skills we want to learn.

*What additional information we want to learn.

Take time this week to imagine what you’d like to be and do in this next phase of your writing career. Then write out your learning objectives for the fall. It will help to direct your writing time. It will also guide what you read and what conferences you choose to attend. It might even ignite your passion for writing. As Stone said above, when we get our sense of mission—we are filled with “a burning desire to get to work on it.” Yes!