We're more than halfway through the year and you might be thinking about reassessing some of your goals.

Maybe you haven't made the progress you wanted to on your novel. Perhaps you launched a blog but struggled to post regularly after the first few weeks. If you're a freelance writer, you may have seen your goals disrupted by massive changes to the industry in the wake of AI.

There are all kinds of reasons why you might be thinking about changing your writing goals ... or even ditching them entirely. But perhaps you're worried about whether it's okay to do so. Are you allowed to change goals you set months ago?

Absolutely!

It's always okay to change your goals or to hit pause on them.

We can often be tempted to push on no matter what ... but sometimes writing and life just don't go how we hoped.

Your goal might have hit some roadblocks in the form of:

• The writing itself. I often think I can finish a novel in X amount of time ... only to find that it needs quite a bit more rewriting than I initially imagined.
• Yourself. Perhaps you had great plans to wake up at 5.30am every day and write ... but you really struggled with this.
• External factors. Maybe you started a new job that's very time-consuming and energy-draining, or one of your kids is fighting bedtime every night.

In some cases, you might be facing all three of these at once! 

Whatever the mix of different issues within your own life, it's fine to adjust your writing goal.

Your goals are supposed to serve you ... not the other way around.

Let's say you set a goal to write a new short story each month. If you're feeling completely out of inspiration for fresh stories at this point, and you're dragging yourself through every word ... please give yourself a break!

I know this can be tough Some writers (me included) find it really difficult to change or let go of a goal that they've set. It can feel like failure.

But other people take a much more relaxed approach to goals. They might be perfectly happy to set the same goal multiple times, learning along the way what works, or figuring out when the time just isn't right.

If your writing goal is making you feel stressed or miserable, hit "pause" for a bit and give yourself a week or two off. You might want to think about whether this is still the right goal for you, or whether now's a good time to take what you've learnt from it onwards into something new.

And if you really don't want to pause on your goal (perhaps you're in the middle of a long writing streak and you don't want to break that streak), then look for ways you might adjust that goal or make it easier. Perhaps a different goal could wait a while, for instance, or you could write at a different time of day or even on a different project.

If you're looking for some writing inspiration or want to shake things up a little, check out these fiction writing prompts:

Writing Prompts (Set 1)

Happy writing,

Ali

P.S. If you missed last week's blog post, you can find it here:

Ten Sentence-Level Mistakes to Watch Out for When Editing Your Fiction [With Examples]

... and don't forget your discount code (SUMMERSALE24) if you're buying anything in the summer sale. Remember, that code is only valid until Friday.

If you accidentally buy something without using the code, email me at ali@aliventures.com and I'll sort out a 50% refund for you.