Career Plans
December 6, 2018

The month of November somehow got away from me. A bad cold and visitors and
Thanksgiving and a short vacation ate up the month since my last post.
Nevertheless, I still got some writing done and some submitting, and got a
number of very nice rejections (and even one re-write request). So it was an
eventful month in many senses of the word.

One of the assignments we were given in our last semester at Johns Hopkins was
to create a writing career plan. The plan was supposed to cover not only the
projects we intended to work on after graduation, but our goals in aspects of
the writing life such as networking, social media presence and professional
development. Down one side of the page was a one-year time-line of actions we
were going to take in pursuit of those goals. I wrote up my plan, turned it
in--and then ignored it for three months after graduation. 

I wish I hadn't. For one, not using my career plan caused me to abandon the
reading list I'd created for myself. Two of the books I'd put on that list,
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit and Sull and Eisenhardt's Simple Rules have
motivated me to come up with my own personal version of Robert Heinlein's 
5 Rules of Writing[1]. Since then, my productivity has more than doubled.

Setting aside my plan also meant that I missed a deadline to apply for a writing
program I was interested in attending. I could argue that the act of putting the
writing program into my plan made it flow out of my memory and onto the page,
but that would just be an excuse. And in any case, I would have been reminded if
I'd looked at my career plan sooner.

A career plan doesn't have to be as formal as the one I wrote for school. It can
be as simple as a list of magazines you aspire to be published in, and how
you're going to make that happen. Or it may be just a commitment to write so
many words a day or to make so many submissions each month.

The true value of a career plan may, in fact, lie in the simple act of creating
it. Coming up with a plan forces you to examine what you hope to get out of the
writing life. There are as many different careers as there are writers, and
someone who's happy to just write and then put their work up online for the
world to see will have a very different career plan than someone who's aiming
for the New York Times bestseller list.

So take some time this month to think about what your ideal writing career would
look like and write down a plan to move yourself towards those goals. Be sure to
pull it out and read it each month during 2019 and to take action as your plan
dictates. I think you'll be quite happy with the results this time next year.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein#Heinlein's_Rules_of_Writing 

(c) 2018 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com