Writing Resolutions You Can Actually Keep

Ways to make 2023 the year you wrote what you wanted

Happy New Year, writers! Are you partying tonight, or sitting quietly with a book and the ball dropping on tv, or anywhere in between? Are you wondering how the year could possibly be over, and how to make your next year meaningful, whether it’s in your relationships, your work, or your writing?

I’m in Paris, which is a privilege and a treat I’m trying not to squander. I’m delighting in my toddler’s first experience of traveling to a different country and culture, learning to chirp “Bonjour” happily as we step into a patisserie and being thrilled by every sight of the Eiffel Tower. (A kind restauranteur gave her an Eiffel Tower keychain, and she’s beside herself.) I’m trying to sink into the pleasures of the Here and Now, and not get distracted by the low-grade panic of the Up Next: all the things I’m expected to do to help promote my book, arriving in April, and all the ways I won’t be able to keep up once work and teaching and writing resume its regular hectic routine.

I’ve always made new year’s resolutions. Rarely for my health or my betterment, but almost exclusively for my writing. This is one of the few times during the year when we can actually take stock and choose to re-set our writing routines; to forge bravely ahead into putting our creative lives first for a while. To make the writing count. And if we’re not able to keep them up all year, so what? It still means a month or three where we wrote and wrote hard. Where we thought about reading and writing and remembered the old joy of the discipline and the craft. If it’s out the window by March, that’s still some time, precious time, where it mattered.

So I have a few writing resolutions to suggest for yourself that might actually be worth keeping. Try taking on one or more of these, if they sound right to you and what you need this year, and remember that shame, blame, and recriminations don’t actually help us get the work done. Ultimately, all we can do is try to set up our routines for success.

In 2023, try:

• Making a specific list of your writing goals at the beginning of each month

• Reading a short story every week (I recommend The New Yorker, One Story, or Joyland)

• Writing 100 words (that’s it! 100!) before you can go to bed

• Deleting one social media app from your phone

• Writing the last paragraph of a story you’ve been mulling, including “The End.” Then you’ll know the ending can be reached — now it’s just all about the setup and the getting there

• Cancelling one tv/media subscription service you currently subscribe to, and reading a book during the time you’d be watching

• Waking up 30 minutes earlier to write (this time cannot be used for email, chores, etc.)

• Speaking of email, try setting a fixed schedule of checking email, once or twice a day

Do any of those sound feasible, or helpful to you, for the writing goals you want to achieve? There was a time, once, when I could sit in a chair and read all day, or write all day, completely immersed in the world I was creating. I don’t want to view those times in my life with completely rosy-tinged regret, because I know I’m a better writer now, and I know my life is different now, and richer and more complex and more wide awake than I ever was then. There are compensations for growing up. But that doesn’t mean I can’t seek those quiet spaces again in my life. Because I always, always find that if I do the least little bit of adjusting and simplifying, if I clear a little space in my heart and heart, the urge to write, and the ideas, return.

The Writerly Bites Podcast will be back in the new year with new thoughts, and of course, there will be all sorts of news around the impending release of my next novel, Minor Prophets. If you’ll consider pre-ordering, it means a ton, and helps tremendously, especially for independent press books. I look forward to sharing more info about the book in the months to come. Have a happy and bright 2023 celebration, everyone.

Your Writing Tip:

• Change the font of your draft when you’re ready to print it out, so that it looks entirely different. The goal of revision is defamiliarization from your own work, so you can edit it more objectively.

Your Writing Prompt:

• You arrive at your aunt’s old beach house, which hasn’t been inhabited in months or years, and discover fresh cut flowers in a vase on the counter.