Home   >   Writing for a Living   >   Conduct Your End Of Year Writing Review

Conduct Your End Of Year Writing Review

By on December 24, 2019

Should you do an end of year writing review As the year draws to a close, it’s a good idea to take stock of what you have achieved in terms of your writing this year, and do a round-up of the successes and failures, the goals you met and the ones you didn’t quite manage, how you feel about your progress, how much money you made, and so on.

Conducting an end of year writing round-up is helpful because often writers don’t have any way to judge their progress apart from to do it themselves. If you haven’t got a book out, or aren’t ready to write professionally, you may not have clear milestones to hit, and you won’t have a boss to do a review of your performance with you, so it’s up to you to create one yourself.

So how do you do this? Here are some of the questions you can ask yourself to create a robust and useful end of year writing review.

Creating an end of year writing review - our top questions

What were the key things you hoped to achieve this year?

Write down or look back over all the goals you set for yourself in 2019. Were they realistic? Do you feel you could have pushed yourself more?

Did you achieve them?

Here you should assess how well you did in terms of each goal and whether you managed to reach your targets, and if you fell short, by how much.

Which things did you find particularly easy or difficult this year?

Understanding the things that you found easy as well as the challenges you faced and the obstacles that you had to overcome will give you a much better idea of where your strengths and weaknesses lie. You can also determine whether there are external factors outside your control that influenced your progress.

What could you put in place to overcome these difficulties?

Understanding how you can prevent repetitive mistakes and tackle areas where you have performed less successfully will ensure that you achieve greater things in the coming year.

How was your attitude toward writing this year?

Analyzing your attitude to your writing is also useful. If you felt positive determined and optimistic at certain times and frustrated, disappointed, and lacking in motivation at others, it will be helpful to examine these emotions and the circumstances that catalyzed them further to understand why. 

In what ways could you improve?

Make a list of the things you want to do better and how you plan to improve, learn and grow after the new year. 

What do you hope to accomplish in the coming year?

Work out some challenging and exciting goals that will help you progress in the coming year. What quantitive measurements could you put in place to determine whether you’ll achieve these future goals? Make sure that your future goals are clearly defined, that they are challenging and that you are fully committed to realizing them within the timeframe you’ve set for yourself. Being able to measure your goals, being realistic about what you can achieve, and having mechanisms in place to measure your progress will help ensure that you stay on track. 

By using the above as a guide, you should be able to conduct a helpful end of year writing review and start the new year feeling confident, motivated, and assured that you could do great things. Good luck!

So now you've done your writing review, why not ask yourself some questions to get more creative?

Get A Free Writer's Toolkit By Visiting https://www.writerslife.org/gid

bethany cadman
Bethany Cadman - bethanycadman.co.uk

About Ty Cohen