So I’ve been trying a sort of experiment for the last couple of months, where I haven’t been setting myself any kind of strict writing goals. Ever since I started taking writing really seriously, back when I was in my first year of my MFA program, I’ve been setting monthly writing goals—which I sometimes don’t meet, I admit, but which always seem to push me to spend more time actually writing than I probably would without the goals.

This past December, I decided that I had reached a kind of writing slump and needed to try to push myself out of it with some new type of goal setting. I posted here, asking for other people to talk about what works for them personally. The response was unexpected and made me completely rethink the idea of goal setting—many writers, it seems, don’t set goals at all. In fact, many people mentioned that they feel strict goals would have the opposite of the desired effect, making them want to rage against the “have to” of writing.

After reading and thinking about all the responses I received, I decided to switch my goal system from concrete hours per month spent writing—a system that had actually worked quite well for me in the past, having seen me through my first publications and even the publication of my first book—to more general project goals. I wanted to finish the millionth revision of my thesis novel (which I did) and to finish the current draft of my new novel (which I haven’t hardly touched at all in the past few months). I also wanted to work on some new stories, if the ideas came—the ideas did come, and I have been working on some stories.

But I have to say, the amount of work I’ve put into my writing ever since I chucked the idea of concrete time goals out the window has dramatically decreased. I mean dramatically. In November of last year, I spent roughly an hour a day writing. This was less than I would have liked, which is why I felt I needed to change my goal system—to see if I could spice things up and push that number higher. At my most productive, I average somewhere around three hours a day, and I’ve always held that number as my golden ideal. But instead of writing more, what happened is that in December, the number of hours I spent writing dropped to about half an hour a day, and it’s remained there ever since.

It’s time to accept the fact that this was a failed experiment. I’m glad to hear that other people don’t need to set such concrete goals to keep writing, but I do. If I don’t keep track of how much I’m writing, and keep an overall goal number in mind, I just don’t write anywhere near as much as I want to. Then I feel depressed. Then I feel like I’m a fraud—I’m trying to convince people to buy my book, and yet deep down inside, I don’t even believe I should be calling myself a writer.

The fact is, I’m not happy if I’m not writing a lot. I need to write, or else the weight of the world starts pressing down on me. The only way I know how to make life feel meaningful is through creating meaning where there wasn’t any before. And the only way I know how to do that is by writing. So I’m giving up on this idea of expecting myself to just automatically do what’s good for me. It’s like eating healthy, exercising, or even taking anti-depressants. It’s not something that most of us would really do if we didn’t decide we needed to, but it’s something that we do, indeed, need to do.