Motivation Gets Squashed by Goals

Each day seems to present itself with new motivations--or lack thereof.

I have read the first 145 pages of my 282-page, double-spaced manuscript, and have been trucking along quite nicely, taking pages of notes about scenes to add, sentences to remove, and dialog to clean up (or dirty up, depending on the speaker). And now, on this quiet Saturday morning, while my children are still sound asleep and while I drink my coffee and listen to my husband playing World of Warcraft in the other room, I have no desire to look at any of it. This is the absolute ideal time for me to be making some ground on getting to the highly-anticipated next step--my first rewrite. And all my mind wants to do is research publishers and agents and whether or not to submit my manuscript to a site where it be could be seen by many acquisitions editors.

Yes, I know that the darn thing needs to be nearly, if not completely, done before I jump to that step! But for some reason, knowing it and doing something about it are entirely different entities.

So, now I have to wonder about my personality. Back in November, I was really close to reaching my word goal of at least 70,000 words for my novel. I had it figured out that I only needed to write 800 words a day to have my first draft by Thanksgiving. That was a piece of cake, I told myself. I had been writing more than that each day on average, at least on the days I was finding time to write. So all I had to do was make myself find an hour each day to devote to writing. And since most of my story was already in my head, I just had to get it out, right? Wrong! I didn't touch the thing for almost a week.

Now here I am, back to the present. I have been breathing this novel. My characters have been revealing minor details about themselves to me, as well as letting me deeper into their psyche. It has all been in the forefront of my mind for the last week, and all I've wanted is some nice, quiet, uninterrupted time to work on it. Then I foolishly told myself, if I take two weeks to read it (easy, right?) and then concentrate on rewriting just 10 pages a day (also easy), I could have my second draft done in six weeks' time. Good news: It didn't slow me down. I was still working at a nice little clip. But then I did something even worse. I set long-term goals. I actually made a goal to finish this, write the sequel, and be ready to write the third by the time NaNoWriMo arrives in November. Dumb move!

I remember being taught how to set long-term and short-term goals back in junior high, but now I have to ask myself, does goal-setting hold me back? And if goal-setting does hold me back, what is supposed to motivate me?