Happy New Writer Resolutions

Lots of folks, including writers, consider resolutions hopelessly artificial. Yet there’s a good chance you recently promised someone (even if only yourself) that you’d exercise more, eat healthier, and quit muttering obscenities at thoughtless drivers unaware of your existence. Resolved anything about your writing? It never hurts to take stock, make plans, celebrate successes, and renew goals. Starting now.

Craft resolutions

~ Don’t deprive readers of the chance to infer.

~ Don’t irritate readers with extra words, gratuitous information, or belaboring of setting, emotion, or anything else.

~ Don’t be afraid of the dark: “…literature begins at the well you leaned over as a child and with the black fear that looked up at you from its depths. From the puppy you patted that turned out to be rabid.” – Aharon Appelfeld’s  Suddenly, Love (translated by Jeffrey M. Green)

~ Don’t patronize: “A good writer, like a good lover, must create a pact of trust with the object of his/her seduction that remains qualified, paradoxically, by a good measure of uncertainty, mystery and surprise.” –  Francine du Plessix Gray

~ Do choose details that take readers where you want their minds to go.

~ Do introduce a third character: “Character triangles make the strongest character combination and are the most common in stories…there’s actually a rather obvious reason for it: balance…. One person isn’t enough to get full interaction. Two is possible, but it doesn’t have a wild card to make things interesting. Three is just right.” –  Ronald B. Tobias

~ Do cut scenes that don’t fulfill their purpose: “If the character leaves the scene essentially as s/he entered it, your reader may become emotionally disengaged. However, if the scene shows great character development but doesn’t move the plot along, then it’s only done half a job. Good scenes should do both.”  –  Rachel Simon

Psychological Resolutions

~ Do try to write (or think about your writing) every day. Even if you can only squeeze out fifteen minutes.

~ Do formulate realistic goals. Then meet them.

~ Do embrace risk: “All the intelligence and talent in the world can’t make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.” –  Willa Cather

~ Do learn from your mistakes: “There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, ‘Mistakes were made,’ you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.” ― Charles Baxter

~ Do be yourself: “The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.” –  Neil Gaiman

~ Do respect your talent enough to demand your best from yourself.

~ Do respect yourself enough to be kind and realistic about own very human foibles.

Tip: A good writing year mixes discipline with tenderness, high standards with empathy.

Resuming the Routine

“I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired to write at 9 o’clock every morning.” ~Peter De Vries

Right now the media are bursting with resolution tips. Naturally. If your resolutions are worth anything, it’s tough to keep them, particularly following the holidays. During this time most of us—in every way—have been less rather than more disciplined than usual. But before you throw up your hands in abject despair about writing at least as well or much, give yourself a break, then a push, in as quick succession as possible.

Vacations, wonderful as they are, always make the first day back to work taxing. It’s not just that you have to catch up; you have to remind your mind how to do this, much the way you remind your muscles what to do if you’ve been deprived of exercise for a while. The good news is that eventually you do the work, reclaim your mind, restore your muscles.

Writing’s the same, and a few reminders may help you recapture your routines more quickly and comfortably.

·         Don’t fight.

The harder you are on yourself, then the longer it will take.

·         Don’t demand more until you catch up.

If you ran a mile every day before, you can’t run five miles if you didn’t run at all for three whole weeks.

·         Do fastidiously record all the great ideas you encountered when not thinking about your writing at all.

These can be the deepest, most exciting ones. Take advantage.

·         Do remind yourself that you created your own routine.

It can feel challenging, tedious or both, but it also comforts. You developed this practice because it works for you—and it will again.

·         Do accept that routine matters.

A large percentage of writing quotes remind that the more you treat writing like any other “job,” the better and more productive you’ll be. Here’s Harlan Ellison: “Anyone can become a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”

Tip: The writers who get farthest fastest set goals, and, with needed adjustments, they keep them.