Recently I had coffee with an old friend who wanted to ask my advice about a writing project. He said he'd been working on it for a couple years, so I figured it was a book and he was looking for guidance on how to go about getting it published.

I was mistaken.

My friend is a soccer coach and has some strong opinions on what's wrong with soccer in the United States. It turns out that his writing project is an essay about how to fix it. (For those of you who aren't soccer fans, the USA didn't qualify for the 2018 World Cup. Boooooo.)

Back to the story: given that my friend said he'd been working on his essay for two years, writing and writing and editing and editing, I balked when he asked if he could send it to me for feedback, thinking it was probably at least fifty pages long.

But again, I was wrong.

What I'd imagined to be a full-fledged manifesto was a grand total of one-and-a-half pages. That's it! His goal was to submit it as an op-ed piece to a local newspaper. That's his dream: submitting a one-and-a-half page op-ed piece to a newspaper. He has no aspirations of writing a novel or of ever getting paid to write anything. He admits that he's not very good, is way too wordy and needs a lot of help with grammar, but he doesn't care about any of those things, because he just loves to write.

Good for him!

After I left the coffee house, I kept thinking about what it means to "be a writer," or "set a goal," and how arbitrary and personal those definitions are. Have you set any writing goals for yourself? If so, please share in the comments!

-Maria

Maria Murnane writes bestselling novels about life, love and friendship. Have questions? You can find her at www.mariamurnane.com.

This blog post originally appeared on CreateSpace.com. Reprinted with permission. © 2018 CreateSpace, a DBA of On-Demand Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.