Assessment of writing habits

While I was in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area last week visiting my friend Jackie, I took advantage of her coaching skills to talk through something about my routine over the last month that's been bothering me: namely, the dearth of fiction in my writing diet.

It's not new for me to avoid writing fiction, but I had assumed (silly me) that once I was home full-time and at leisure to write whatever I wanted, the fiction would just explode out of me and I would become a fiction-writing machine. Instead, I wrote and published 19 blog posts in October and spent countless hours on Twitter and Facebook. Okay, I did write two prose poems (both of which I self-published on World Citizen because I judged them to be "too weird" for traditional publication in journals or lit mags). But all those ideas for short stories? For a romance novel? For anything, in fact, that I don't intend to publish immediately? Hardly touched.

What is assessment?

In its broadest sense, assessment is the process of setting goals, choosing strategies to help achieve those goals, checking on whether those strategies are working, and then making adjustments as necessary, i.e. when the strategies aren't working as we'd like or the goals change.

When seen in this light, it's clear to me that assessment is a life philosophy, not just something that educators do. And, like any life philosophy, it's not for everyone.