Normally, I would discuss the following year's goals in my end of the year Book and Author News post. Undoubtedly I will when I work on it in a day or two.

I wanted to separate out my focus for 2022, however, so that I can clarify the particular way I'm going to pursue those goals. Hopefully, this will also help other creatives struggling to produce.

Productivity

For the last few years, my annual keyword has been productivity. It's a good goal to have for any professional, yes?

The problem is that the focus on productivity alone, absent the context of my personality, life situation, and strengths, has not helped me move the needle on word count and publication.

That said, the last couple of years have been better than the previous few. From 2016 to 2018, my annual word count ranged between (roughly) 153,500 and 157,000. In 2019, I managed around 206,000, which dipped to 170,700 in 2020 and will likely be around 181,000 for 2021.

Not bad, but not exactly where I need it to be.

By comparison, in 2015 I wrote about 448,000 words. That was my last truly productive year. I don't have word counts for 2014 (those are tucked away somewhere in storage), but I know that in the first 14-15 months of writing fiction, I hit the million word mark. By my estimation, knowing what I know about my word counts in the bracketing years (2013 and 2015), I probably wrote more than 800,000 to 850,000 words in my first full year of writing fiction.

Writing Process

One of the reasons for the lower annual word count is, I believe, a shift I made in late 2015 from a scenes per day measurement to a word count measurement.

Back then, the emphasis on daily word count goals was just hitting its stride in the indie community. I shifted in an attempt to become more productive, not realizing that the scenes per day model was so vital to my writing process that moving away from it actually decreased my productivity.

That wasn't the only detrimental change I made. I started focusing on one book at a time (rather than juggling projects) and one series at a time, which I had never done before. That also contributed to the lower word count for reasons I'll discuss in a moment.

Last year, I realized just how far I had strayed from the things that worked for me and started trying to correct that. Unfortunately I landed in burnout a couple of times before that correction could be completed. I did, however, do one thing recently that's helped me understand why I'm focusing on the wrong thing and how I can get back to the process that really works for me.

CliftonStrengths (TM)

For the past couple of months, the CliftonStrengths assessment has been one of the top topics of conversation in the indie author Facebook groups I participate in.

The assessment measures 34 areas and weighs them to help individuals understand where their strengths and weaknesses lie. The idea behind the assessment is that true success comes by focusing on one's strengths rather than shoring up one's weaknesses. To that end, the recommendation is to really lean into one's top five strengths, drawing on the next five as needed.

I'm not usually one to jump on a bandwagon (when I do, the result tends toward not good), but from the way other authors talked about how taking the assessment had helped them, I decided to try it myself.

And was completely unsurprised by the results.

As it happens, four of my top five CliftonStrengths have to do with intellectual behavior: Input (accumulating ideas), Learner (learning), Intellection (introspection), and Ideation (ideas), respectively, strengths 1, 2, 3, and 5).

Strength 4 is Strategic, which covers high level thinking, strategy, and situational assessment.

These are my drivers, not ambition, not money, not word count or productivity, but ideas and the way they're put together.

It's almost like I was born to be a writer, since that's exactly what writing is.

It's also why I was so productive during my first year and a quarter: I was chasing ideas, learning as much as I could about story worlds and the characters inhabiting them (research and world building), intellectualizing what I had learned (outlining and plotting), and creating something brand new out of the intersections of imagination and real world knowledge.

I placed no limits on this either. While I did have projects I focused on, I also allowed myself to play with new ones, which ultimately led to writing my bestselling book to date (The Choosing by Lucy Varna) and a finalist in a well-known writing contest (Tempered, also by Lucy Varna).

My attempt to be more productive by focusing on word count and such was well-intended, but it was nearly fatal to my creativity. Writing was a drag during those years, a chore. That's easily seen by my annual word counts. To be truly productive as a writer, I need to focus on the ideas again, something I've been gradually changing and hope to fully dive into at the start of the new year.

3 x 3 x 3

I would love to completely discard the business end of things, but the reality is that my writing is a business. I literally cannot afford to ignore marketing, accounting, and other aspects of writing that allow me to connect with readers and earn a living.

The problem is that once I start on the business side, it's hard to stop. There's always more to be done, after all. It's difficult to focus on writing (the thing that really drives my business) when you've got a mental list of marketing to-dos cluttering up your brain.

To combat those dual problems (maintaining the business without wearing out my creative side), I decided to focus on one business project each working day.

Thankfully, authors have a ton of resources to draw from. One of my favorites is author Nicholas Erik's curated list of promo sites.

Erik also has a newsletter, courses, and other resources for authors, and has formulated a useful productivity system called 3 x 3 x 3. In the three-cubed system, authors divide their time between marketing, productivity, and reading without being dogmatic.

He explains that in detail in his various offerings, so I won't do that here. The point is, this is a useful system that can help authors tackle their major business related activities without being overwhelmed.

For me, this means giving myself permission to both limit the amount of time I spend daily on marketing and to allow for a day here and there when I focus on nothing but marketing and the business end (during a release, for example).

Refilling the Creative Well

The three-cubed system also emphasizes something I've neglected quite a bit in the past year because of life situations, including helping to pack up and or move the contents of four houses and the early birth of my first grandson, and that's making sure my creative well is full.

Reading fiction has been difficult since I started writing it; it took a long time for me to convince my internal editor to hush up while I was reading. During that time when my internal editor misbehaved, I shifted to reading non-fiction, which doesn't deliver quite the same experience. My son gently reminded me of this in 2014 when he asked if I was reading fiction.

Wise man there.

Anyway, that's when I started trying to find authors I could read without triggering my internal editor. This year, however, I stopped reading again, and it really hurt me creatively. As I explained to my dad one day when he fussed at me for reading (really, he did), "Words in, words out." Reading refills the creative well and allows me to write.

There are other things as well. Movie going, for example. I missed going to theaters to see movies on the big screen during the lockdowns. My favorite movie theater shut down, but another local one that I like reopened and is doing well. I've been several times in the past couple of months and have come away each time recharged to some extent or another.

I could go on. Road trips, new places, learning something new, long bouts of daydreaming (introspection/thinking) in quiet places. All of these really feed into my creativity, and I'm trying to emphasize doing those things specifically, to the point of planning my day around them.

Sleep

The biggest thing right now, though, is getting adequate rest. I have a difficult time sleeping under normal circumstances, but right now, with the stress of the holidays and helping my dad move into his new house combined with some underlying health problems, I'm not getting anywhere near the sleep I need. The sleep I do get is fractured and of such a low quality that I often feel like I need to rest to recover from sleeping.

Hopefully things will settle down soon so that I can destress and rest. If they don't, I'll take another approach to solving that problem, because it is a huge problem right now. Not only does a lack of rest affect mood, health, and one's ability to handle ordinary life, but it affects one's ability to think and create. There are days when my brain literally shies away from thinking about the stories I'm writing because I'm so tired and overwhelmed. So for me, getting better rest is absolutely key to maintaining a creative life.

Learning

Finally, I'm going into the new year with an emphasis on focused learning, which I have also sorely neglected in the past couple of years.

Part of my focus will be on research for stories I'd like to write. For instance, I have two textbooks set aside, waiting for me to study them, one on the planets, the other on writing military science fiction. I'm not sure exactly how I'll incorporate that into my schedule, but it's a definite must-do in 2022.

Another part of my focus will be on learning in general. I'm a little bit of a language geek. Not many people know this, but I studied several languages in high school and college (French, Spanish, German, and Archaic Hebrew) and scored fairly high on the DLAB (the Defense Department's Language Aptitude Battery) when I was considering a career in the Army to qualify for studying the hardest languages for native English speakers.

I'd really like to refresh my knowledge of French and begin learning Russian (I have a long fascination with Russia) in 2022, so I've looking hard at language programs that will allow me to do both without blowing my budget all to hell.

Drive and Other Strengths

My sister once accused me of having no drive. From her perspective as a highly competitive, highly successful basketball coach, that's probably true.

But from my perspective, it's not true at all. One cannot publish as many books as I have without having some sort of drive. My drive as a creative simply looks different from hers as a competitor.

Ideas, it turns out, are my driving force, collecting them, picking them apart, learning more, and putting them back together again in new and interesting ways. That's why I was so productive right out of the gate with writing fiction, because of my proclivity for collecting ideas.

But if competition (#19), achievement (#17), discipline (#23), consistency (#24), and focus (#18) are not my drivers or strengths, how then can I successfully maintain and build a business? Are ideas alone all I need to succeed?

No, I don't believe so, but I have other strengths I can lean on, namely CliftonStrengths #6-10: Maximizer, Responsibility, Individualization, Futuristic (thinking of and planning for the future), and Analytical. When taken together, those strengths provide a solid foundation on which to build a successful writing career.

2022 and Beyond

During 2022, I hope to revive the creative drive I enjoyed during my first year and a half of writing fiction. While I'm focused on the Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI Series (Celia Roman) right now, my goal is to juggle it with another, unrelated project as soon as I can. Juggling projects really fuels my creativity, allowing me to explore and pursue multiple ideas at once.

Do I know what that alternate project will be? No, not yet. Very likely, it will be either a Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic, or Satire story for my C.D. Watson pen name, or more probably, it will be something entirely different, something I haven't done before. I need to explore something fresh and literary; it's been building in my bones for a while. But I haven't committed to anything yet outside finishing up the Vanessa Kinley and Sunshine Walkingstick Series.

Creativity, though, may continue to be my keyword of choice for a few years as I rebuild my business and find my focus. Or, rather, focii as I have no intention of limiting myself to a singular genre.