Finding Guideposts for Your Writing
Purchase access to the video replay and workbook – $20
This talk, originally presented at the Write Your Own Way Summit in 2025, provides a framework for exploring your identity as a writer and gaining clarity on what you want to achieve, so that you can better navigate all the decisions you have to make as part of your writing life. You’ll learn a series of exercises that will help you more deeply understand your relationship with your readers and choose a writing pace that aligns with your strengths, your resources, and your writing career goals. The accompanying workbook guides you through all the exercises in the talk and links to a number of resources and references (both free and paid) to help you go deeper.
This talk lays the groundwork for an upcoming course called Poetry Revision Lab. “Finding Guideposts for Your Writing” is a fancy title for a framework that I first called “poetic goal setting,” which I think is a key preliminary step that guides the revision process. If revision is the way we make our poems the best we can, first we need to know what “the best” is. I believe we’re in a place to make solid decisions about how to change our poems (and how much time to give them) when we have a specific idea of the kind of poet we want to be. We have to be able to see more clearly what path we’re on.
The talk centers around three main questions: Who are you as a writer? Who is your intended audience? What would you like to achieve in your writing life? You may have done some of this work already, but I haven’t seen any writing teachers or coaches talk about goal-setting and audience in quite the same way, and in part I’m drawing from resources outside of the writing world that I thought could give us a useful perspective. Here are some exercises/concepts that are likely to be new to you:
- The Book Cover Test
- Writing Your Writer Biography
- Audiences of Connection and Audiences of Ambition
I’m excited to share this framework with you and hear what you think!
Purchase access to the video replay and workbook – $20
Speaker: Meg Hartmann