Please, please, writers and artists, make these two goal sheets for yourself in 2022 and hang them somewhere prominent so you don't forget about them

The era of Big Trauma and Big Burnout requires a new approach to creative goal-setting--and it's basically the inverse of what we all used to do.

Before we get to the topic at hand, a quick note:

Q and A newsletter coming on Friday! Please send me your questions by Thursday.

I said this newsletter would be back from holiday break last week. I lied. Apologies.

I am making up for it with two newsletters this week: today’s (hello! Happy new year) and an open-call Q and A on Friday.

This means I need your questions! Ask me any questions you’d like about book publishing, writing, etc. by emailing me at anna@neonliterary.com with the subject heading “Glow question” no later than noon on Thursday, January 6. I’ll answer every question I can.

The Q and A will be for paid subscribers only. All are welcome to ask questions, but in order to view my answers, you’ll need to be on The Paid List.

Anyhoo—

As a publishing professional invested in your long-term career success, I want you to set nothing but anti-goals this year.

If the term “anti-goals” sounds too much like a stupid self-help trend, you may also refer to these as New Year’s Res-no-lutions. Hyuck hyuck.

Whatever you choose to call them, what I’m generally advising you to do is set goals only for what you will stop doing in 2022. Not what you will do. Forget that positive shit. Focus on the negative!

My executive coach, the amazing Elizabeth Su, told me to make a “stop doing” list for myself the other week. I’ve found the exercise revelatory—so much so that I think it’s maybe 100% of the goal-setting I need to be doing right now, and I suspect the same might be the case for you.

Pretty much no one has the bandwidth they did before the pandemic: emotional, physical, temporal, mental. Our pipes are backed up with two years’ accumulated trauma, uncertainty, clutter, interruption, disruption, and distraction.

It’s going to be a looong time before any of us can even acquire the neuropsychological Drain-O necessary to unclog ourselves, let alone deploy said Drain-O. So those of us who haven’t learned to live with a slow-draining life should probably go ahead and try.

I am not telling you to stop writing or creating or put a sock in your ambition. Nor am I telling you that setting anti-goals for yourself will necessarily end up where I hope it will: with you having freed-up spoons to do more things you find meaningful and important.

It might!! It has for me, somewhat! But it’s also possible that setting anti-goals will “free up” nothing but your irrepressible urge to go to sleep / curl up screaming in the fetal position. Qué será.

If this turns out to be the case for you—you slow down for a hot second and immediately have a nervous breakdown—that’s great too, at least in my book. (Of course, I have no insight as to the financial practicalities of a fallow creative year for you. I’m addressing the big picture: the overall arc of your career and quality of your work. And I want you to take care of yourself and enlist the help of licensed professional[s] whenever possible on your mental health journey.)

Why on earth is a nervous breakdown great? Because what we want for you is self-healing and self-regeneration in 2022. We don’t want productivity per se. And some of us might just have to start our healing by coming apart.

The last thing we want is you hobbling through project after project on a psychological stress fracture. The distraction of that is going to make your writing a lot worse: less empathic, less rich, less curious. And subpar writing in the short term will sabotage every part of your career in the long.

I don’t care what self-annihilating tricks you’ve come up with to perform through the pain of mental injury: ice packs of neurosis, steroids of self-reproach, homeopathic venting on social media. You’re going to need to actually heal if you want to write great books. So if breaking down, resting, and healing is “all” you end up doing in 2022, fine.

With respect to your creative career, there are two categories of anti-goals I want you to focus on setting for yourself.

Seriously: write out separate lists for both of these and put them somewhere you can’t ignore. They’re that important.

Here’s what they are: