Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Setting Goals You'll Actually Want to Keep

Over New Year’s weekend, I’m doing two important activities: celebrating on New Year’s day with friends, good food, singing, and collage-making; and a review and preview of my own years past and future, to help me decide what I want to create next.

The collage-making is an annual ritual, and I’ll be sharing the steps I use in a special post on New Year’s day. I find it helpful to create physical arrangements of images that spark my interest, help me see where I’ve been and where I want to go, and bring in the less conscious aspects of my creative life. My family all participate—we clean off our big dining room table and spread out magazines (art mags and National Geographic are super for great photos), glue sticks, paper, and scissors. It’s a fun, interior process, but there’s a lot of discovery involved. I like to keep mine loose, often tearing the images instead of neatly cutting them.

Sometimes the collage becomes the focal point for a book, as in this quick one I did when I started flying lessons to research my recent novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue.

Sometimes it becomes the cover for a journal that lasts several months, so I get to study its meaning over time.

I’m still learning about this one! But I love the movement of it, and it seemed to reflect that period of my life in 2023 when things were crazy fast but definitely headed in an interesting direction.

Here’s one in progress that I’ll continue over the weekend.

Collages work so well to get my ideas started for the new year.

Another activity that helps me set goals I can keep, that have deep meaning for me, is a review of the year and a preview of the year to come, focusing on my creative life—which for me includes writing, painting, and gardening.

I thought I’d share some of that with you today, too, in the hopes that it might inspire you to do something similar over the long weekend, before the new year hits us all.

Year in review

I do this review a bit differently. I ask myself three questions:

1. What surprised me about this year? What unexpected doorways opened?

2. What did I create that satisfied me the most?

3. What did I learn and how did I serve with that learning?

Surprises and doorways—some delights and some downers:

1. Readers loved my book (new novel released in October, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue). Reviews were great and are still coming. I did not expect such a positive reception (blame it on slow burners with past books). And male readers loved it, which knocked me over (it’s women’s fiction, guys, but I guess the pilot and Search & Rescue aspects appealed?). The book was chosen for book clubs and Kirkus gave it a half page in their monthly magazine. A lot of successes here that I hoped for but didn’t expect.

2. After years of working at it, my spouse, also a creator (singer/songwriter), and I refined our ways of getting private (“alone”) time in the house. This is huge for us.

3. Covid slammed me after my book launch, second time around and less intense, but it created a feeling of burn out that I’m still recovering from. I tell myself it wasn’t because of the book tour, right?

4. After a concentrated burst of painting early in the year, I didn’t do much with my art. I missed it! The book took over, which was right. I learned I couldn’t do both.

5. My garden, a main creative outlet in summer, turned low maintenance out of necessity (book again). Oddly, it flourished. Go figure.

Most satisfying creative ventures:

1. The concentrated month of daily painting. I made studies of reflected light on water. Took good risks, have 25 studies on my studio walls, waiting for next steps.

2. I wanted an audiobook made for my first novel (2009), Qualities of Light. It was completed in October. I fell in love with the story all over again.

3. A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue was a huge learning experience and beyond successful in my view.

4. I learned as much as I could about marketing that’s sustainable and honors who I am, thanks to Dan Blank and mentors I worked with.

5. Your Weekly Writing Exercise moved to Substack and started paid subscriptions for its new First Sunday Q&A. Subscriptions grew to around 3000, up by 450, 87 of those paid.

6. My next novel, Last Bets, is through production and set up for marketing in 2024, with a wonderful street team, giveaways, blogger tour, and other fun things planned. It’ll go into pre-orders on January 8.

What did I learn and how did I serve:

1. My biggest learning was about how to share my love of my new book with readers.

2. From reader response, I can say the story served to entertain, enlighten, and educate.

3. I gave my time and energy to these Substack newsletters each week, sharing what I learned with all of you.

4. I learned it was terrifically hard to continue when I was under the weather with Covid recovery for weeks into months. Much better now, but whew.

5. The toggle between the two books really intensified in fall. Not easy. I learned how to love the born child while pregnant with the next one.

Year ahead

I love two goal-setting or envisioning tools and have used them for years:

• presume (writing a future resume as if you’re at year’s end looking back)

• collage

I find these helpful because I’ve always had trouble accurately imagining twelve months into the future. I do better when I let my more random side explore what speaks to me now and what draws me to learn and play.

I know this doesn’t sound like a super-disciplined approach. But I feel it’s a first step—I have to scope out the atmosphere around my goals before I can make them into task lists or timelines. Both the presume and collage taps the more subconscious levels of our creative selves, letting the imagination roam. I like this because it feels like anything is possible. I focus on the what and why, rather than the how.

When I write a presume, it might look like this:

December 31, 2024:

Looking back on a surprisingly successful year in all ways with my creative life, I see how amazingly THIS, THIS, and THIS happened. I was able to embrace enough relaxation and quality retreat time to keep myself creatively energized. I allowed myself to explore new territory, such as THIS and THIS. New doorways opened unexpectedly, THIS, especially, and THIS, which brought me great joy.

Fill in the THIS with specifics (see below). Envision yourself at this future date, looking back—a year from now, or even a few months ahead works well. Write down the qualities of experience you’d like to have had by then. It’s really a simple visualization exercise, nothing extraordinary, but it works wonders for me.

The collage brings in the visuals—I may not know, at the time, why I’m choosing a certain shape, color, or image. Like a mood board, it speaks to my loves, the things I want to spend time with.

Then, there are the specifics. I’ll share a few thoughts I’ve been jotting down about what those might be. They came from the two exercises above, though. I feel it’s often important, at least for me, to get the big picture first.

Areas I want to create/experience in 2024:

1. Joyful, satisfying launch for novel #3, Last Bets. Give it as much love as I can, recognize its uniqueness and how can I share that uniqueness with the world.

2. Painting retreat! Allow that daily practice with only exploration.

3. Learn more on Substack and make this newsletter even more useful and valuable to readers.

I’ll have a much longer list in a month or two. Ideas will come forward as I taste the ones above, as we move into real time with the new year, as I scan for what I want to allow in and what I want to let go of. I’ll do more contemplating on the collage and presume images to generate ideas.

Can’t wait to see what will unfold!

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This weekend, if you can break away from New Year’s fun, spend a good hour with your journal or a collage activity. Look back at 2023 and see if you can list your satisfactions in your creative life, using the three questions above.

Then look ahead to 2024 and see if either the collage or presume exercise triggers images of what might make you the happiest in your creative life in the months to come.

Here are additional questions to help, if needed.

For your year in review:

1. What three things gave me the most satisfaction in 2023?

2. When I feel good about the past year, what key memories come forward most easily?

3. What are the most important truths I learned about myself, my creativity, my life?

4. What unexpected gifts did I give myself, my creativity, my life that has meaning now?

5. Any mistakes that turned out to be good, after all?

6. Who did I learn from the most?

7. How did I serve?

For your year ahead:

1. Where could I best put my 2023 learning into 2024 practice?

2. What projects are hot for me right now? What do I really long to spend time with?

3. What is NOT important—even if it should be—to me right now?

4. Who are the people I could learn the most from? Or mentor/teach?

5. What do I need to make more functional or sustainable in the new year? For example, are there deadweight items in my life that need to be cleared away? Do I have software to learn or install, new writing or art equipment to get to make my creative life easier?

6. How much rest and rejuvenation time do I need in the new year? How will I get it?