Need writing motivation? Put your money where your goals are with a challenge group!

Do you have trouble sticking with your writing goals — or even starting at all? Try throwing some money at the problem by starting a writing challenge accountability group.

Set writing goals together, and pay in money that you'll forfeit if you don't hit your target — or win off each other if you do!¹

How to start your own writing challenge group:

1. Get a group of friends together who are writers — Facebook groups work well for this.
    
   
2. Decide on a challenge length. It could be one week or one month or some other length.
    
   
3. Choose the amount of money you'll ante up. About $20 US seems right to motivate but not impoverish.
    
   
4. Someone is in charge of holding the kitty and being the challenge cheerleader. Everyone pays in, usually through PayPal.
    
   
5. You each publicly set a challenge goal and then check in and cheer each other on every day.
    
   
6. By the end of the challenge, you each declare whether you met or missed your goal. The honor system prevails.
    
   
7. Losers forfeit their money. Winners get their money back plus a share of the losers' money.
    
   

For instance, assuming a $20 buy-in from 6 participants, if two fail, the other four collect back $30 each. A nice little prize for completing your writing goal!

And even if you fail, you got to work on your writing and you're several steps closer to your goal than you were before, so despite the loss of funds, it's still not really losing!

Some tips on starting your own writing challenge group:

Sunday Surf: Security, insecurity, and fun new tools

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Diagramly - Draw Diagrams Online

Need to diagram a plot or your thinking process? Free online tool for flow charts and other visual thinking.

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#NaNoProgMo January 2012: Week 1

I told myself I'd be better about making periodic progress posts for NaNoProgMo this time around. Easy enough, considering I haven't been making any progress!

Ok, that's not strictly true: I'm 1 hour into my 15-hour goal. Still, I haven't been working on my writing every day as I've meant to. I think setting my goal so low this month has made me feel like I can get behind, because catching up will be relatively easy. I was hoping I wouldn't take my half-hour a day as a maximum but as a minimum to get my momentum going. Um … yeah … I should have known me better.

Well, there's always next month!

I'm feeling discouraged about my mystery novel, the one I thought was almost finished last NaNoProgMo. I'm having Sam read it through for his second time after major revisions. I thought he might have some thoughts for tightening it up.

Well, be careful what you ask for, because he's only a third or so in, and he's already given me ideas for changing the whole direction of the novel.

The ambition of a writer who's also a mother

Up through my twenties, I had very little ambition. I mean, I wanted to be a novelist someday, but it wasn't urgent. I had no drive to make money, or impress people, or achieve much of anything.

For reasons beyond my understanding, that all changed when I started blogging. Mikko was three months old when I started Hobo Mama. Especially as the blog grew, I discovered in myself a passion to make something of myself, to be professional, to be taken seriously as a writer.

And yet, even now, even still, four and a half years later, I wrestle with that tension: ambition vs. motherhood, writing vs. parenting, success vs. fear. It's hard to say which will win, at any given moment and over time.

When I blog and when I work on my novel and other projects, or even when I do the business taxes for our family or work on my sewing, I feel the age-old guilt of a mother otherwise engaged. I am not paying attention to my children. I am devoting myself to something other.

But I also feel the spark of that other within me driving me on, compelling me to create, to do, to pursue. When I let it go for a time, I feel stagnant. But when I fall too headlong into it, it becomes repellant to me — what I become seems repellant to me.

Where does this tension come from?