9 Writing Goals Poets Should Set Beyond Publication
Get published is a wish, not a goal. A contest judge offers nine writing goals poets actually control, how to pick two, and what one form goal did to a flat quatrain.
Every January my inbox fills with the same resolution wearing different fonts: this is the year I get published. By March, most of those poets have gone quiet, and it is not because they lacked discipline. It is because they picked a goal they do not control. An editor controls publication. A judge controls prizes. You control none of it, and a goal you cannot control is not a goal, it is a wish with a deadline. The writing goals poets actually need are the ones that live entirely inside their own hands, and after years of reading contest entries I can tell you those goals produce better poems, faster, than the wish ever does.
Publication Is a Lagging Indicator
Runners do not train by staring at the finish line, they train by intervals, mileage, sleep. Publication works the same way: it is a lagging indicator, the delayed public echo of private work done months or years earlier. Chase the echo and you spend your energy on submission spreadsheets and refreshing your inbox. Chase the work and the echo eventually arrives on its own schedule.
There is also a quieter cost to publication-first thinking. It teaches you to write toward approval, and approval-seeking poems have a smell judges recognize instantly: safe subjects, fashionable line breaks, endings that curtsy. The strongest entries I score every month read like the poet was answering to the poem, not to me.
Chase publication and you practice waiting. Chase craft and you practice poetry.
The Writing Goals Poets Can Actually Control
A usable goal passes three tests. You can start it tonight without anyone's permission. You can measure it yourself, honestly, in minutes or drafts or pages. And failing at it teaches you something specific instead of just hurting. Get published fails all three tests. Everything on the list below passes, and each one, pursued for a season, will change what your drafts are capable of. Publication tends to follow poets who set goals like these, in the same sideways manner that health follows people who stop chasing the scale.
Nine Goals Worth a Year of Your Life
- Master one form until it obeys you. Pick a single form, the sonnet is the classic gym, and write twelve of them in a year. Not to publish, to train. Form forces choices free verse lets you dodge: compression, the placed turn, the earned ending. The worked example below shows what this does to ordinary lines.
- Read one hundred poems with a pencil. Not skim, read: mark every line break that surprised you and write one sentence about why. Two poems a week makes you, within a year, a sharper reader of your own drafts than most workshops will.
- Push ten poems through five drafts each. Most poets abandon revision at draft two, exactly where the real work starts. Fifty total drafts across ten poems will teach you your personal failure patterns, and knowing your patterns is half of style.
- Rebuild your line break instinct. Take five finished poems and re-break every line, then compare. Study enjambment until you can say what each break in your poem is doing. A poem where every break is a decision reads differently, and judges feel it even when they cannot name it.
- Memorize five poems you love. Memorization installs rhythm at a depth reading never reaches. You will hear your own flat lines faster because your ear now carries better furniture.
- Get a response for every poem you finish. Not publication, response: a reader, a group, a scored contest. Writory returns a five-criteria breakdown, creativity, emotion, structure, language, theme, to every entrant each month, which turns even a losing poem into a data point you can act on. Poems that meet readers grow; poems that meet folders do not.
- Write thirty bad poems on purpose. This is the goal that feels illegal, and it is the one perfectionists need most. Deliberately unpublishable drafts, one a day for a month, teach your inner censor to wait outside. Every poet I know with real range has a version of this practice.
- Find two poem friends. Not a big workshop, two people who will read your work within a week and tell you where they stopped believing. Sustained honest readership beats occasional expert feedback.
- Name your obsession and dig there. Reread everything you wrote last year and find the theme that keeps surfacing, grief, memory, leaving, mothers. Then write into it on purpose for a season. Poets with a claimed territory write with an authority that scattered poets never quite reach.
A Worked Example: What a Form Goal Does to a Draft
Here is goal one in action, from my own notebook during a sonnet year. The draft quatrain, in loose free verse:
I keep your photograph inside my wallet
and I look at it whenever I feel lost,
which is more often than I would admit
to anyone who knows me.
Honest and limp. Then the form goal kicks in: get it toward pentameter, and make the fourth line turn instead of trail. The pressure of counting forces every word to reapply for its job:
I keep your photograph behind my cards
and pay for bread with your face in my hand.
The grocer thinks I smile at him. I don't.
I am practicing not saying your name.
Look what the constraint produced that intention never asked for: the transaction image, the misread smile, the confession arriving as a turn in the last line rather than a sigh. I did not get more talented between those two versions. I got more constrained, and the constraint did the lifting. That is what a craft goal buys you: the form becomes a collaborator that shows up every day, unlike inspiration.
The Poet Who Memorized Her Way Out
The entrant who converted me to goal five was a retired schoolteacher whose early submissions were competent and forgettable, the language scores always a point behind everything else. She told me later that she had stopped drafting entirely for two months and simply memorized poems instead, five of them, walking her dog, one stanza per lamppost. The first new poem she wrote afterward placed in our top ten, and the difference was audible in one read: her lines had stopped shuffling and started striding. Nothing about her vocabulary changed. Her ear had been retrained by carrying better cadences around the neighborhood, and the ear is the organ that actually writes.
How to Pick Two and Ignore Seven
Nine goals is a menu, not a syllabus. Attempt all nine and you will achieve none by April. Pick exactly two for the next quarter, using this filter:
- One goal should target your known weakness. If judges and readers keep flagging your endings, that is the form goal or the revision goal, not the reading goal you would enjoy more.
- One goal should be pure appetite, the one you reread on this list. Appetite carries you through week six, when novelty is gone.
- Both must fit your actual life in minutes per day. A fifteen minute goal you keep beats a two hour goal you abandon, by roughly a hundred percent.
- Write both goals where you write, first page of the notebook, taped above the desk. Unwritten goals dissolve by February; I have watched it happen to poets far more disciplined than me.
Then review at the quarter's end, keep what fed you, and swap what did not. Two goals, four quarters: that is eight seasons of deliberate practice inside a single year, which is more directed training than most poets get in five.
Let Publication Catch Up to You
I am not against publication. I run scoring for a contest; I am in the acceptance business. But I have read enough entries to know exactly which poets end up in the winners' lists: the ones whose goals were craft-shaped all along, who showed up in month eight with line breaks that had opinions and endings that turned. Publication found them at their desks, mid-goal, and it usually arrived looking smaller than they expected, because by then the work itself had become the point.
So retire the wish. Choose two goals from the nine tonight, write them where you will see them, and let the finish line worry about itself. And when a poem comes out of that practice hot and finished, by all means send it somewhere that answers back. Just notice, when you do, that the sending has become the smallest part of your writing life. That is how you know the goals worked.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.