You have a deadline coming up.You know how many words you need to write each day to meet that deadline. You have your headphones and your beverage of choice on hand. How do you stay accountable to those daily writing goals?

Accountability and group reporting

My writing group and I have a Facebook message thread that we use to bounce ideas back and forth. This month, we started an accountability exercise. It’s simple. At the end of each day, we report in our word counts or progress with other writing-related goals (e.g., writing a synopsis, working on an outline, revising a chapter). I am speaking for the others based on their daily reported progress — having to report in to the group on a daily basis has been highly motivating for all of us.

Some suggestions to make group accountability exercises work:

– Celebrate each others’ successes.
– Provide encouragement when others don’t meet their goals.
– Be honest with your self-reporting.
– Don’t make excuses.
– Give yourself allowances for those hard days. You’re only human.
– Don’t give up.

There are other daily/regular writing groups that can you may utilize to accomplish the same sorts of things as my group’s message thread.

Write Club: A Twitter-based group where writers band together from all over the world on Friday night (or at other times throughout the week) to do 30 minute sprints. Word counts are reported in using the hashtag #WriteClub. Follow the Twitter account @FriNightWrites for sprint prompts and visit their website for schedule of sprinting times.

5amWritersClub: Is morning writing more of your thing? Reporting your daily word count using the hashtag #5amWritersClub will connect you to a group of highly motivated morning writers like yourself! Check out their website for their story and the history of the hashtag.

Do you have a writing community that helps you stay accountable? Please comment below!

Helen Boswell loved to get lost in the pages of a story from the time she could sound out the words. She credits her dad, an avid fiction reader, with encouraging her to read all of the books on his shelves from the time she was a teenager. Originally from upstate New York, Helen spent much of her early adult life tromping around in Buffalo, NYC, Toronto, and Las Vegas, those cities now serving as inspiration for the dark and gritty backdrops of her stories. An author of both urban fantasy and contemporary romance, she loves to read and write characters that come to life with their beauty, flaws, and all. She is the author of YA urban fantasies MYTHOLOGY, THE WICKED, and NA contemporary romance LOSING ENOUGH.