Greetings, writers—
According to a study by sponsored by the fitness app Strava, January 19th is the day that most people abandon their New Year’s resolutions.
I can hardly pretend that I’ve done a great job with my resolutions, but I don’t buy this abandonment business: I think it’s more likely that people resolved to go running every day, and then on January 19th it was really cold and shitty (as it is today), so they stayed home. It doesn’t mean they won’t go out again on the 20th. And just because not a single glass of tap water passed my lips yesterday doesn’t mean that I won’t do better on the hydration front today.
Did you make (writing) resolutions? Were they specific and measurable? Did you keep track of your progress? Did you try habit stacking?
Fine questions, fine strategies for some. I can’t make a habit of habit-stacking and I’m too forgetful to track my progress, but then again I’m writing a couple of novels and Substack, not trying to take my company public or train for a marathon.
So maybe I should think more in terms of future finish lines, rather than daily behaviors. Like:
By this time next year, I will have a finished draft of my novel, the one that no one is waiting for.
Pretty solid. Not as fun as this one, though:
By this time next year I will have a fortune, have cut the throats of my best friends, have kicked my inferiors in the pants, have refused to be connected with any strangers except properly identified ones, and be loved and respected by all.
That’s Dawn Powell, writing in her diary in 1933. Obviously she didn’t mean all of it, but what a fun motivational poster it would make. The kitten’s dangling from the branch, just like it has been since 1980-whatever1, but it says “Cut throats, make a fortune, be loved.”
What would your kitten say? What would you like to do by this time next year? What would your characters like to have happen in their lives by this time next year?
These are things to ponder. In writing? Why not.
Another option: write a scene/poem/story in which one of your characters says something to someone that they don’t actually mean.
Like, was William Carlos Williams really sorry that he ate those plums?
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. This has nothing to do with writing. But I, along with thousands of other former middle-school-orchestra nerds, mourn the passing of Peter Schickele, creator of P.D.Q Bach, “the supremely unmusical spawn of Johann Sebastian Bach — ‘the last and by far the least” of his 20-odd children, … ‘and certainly the oddest,’” whose parodic musical manuscripts Schickele “found” in trash cans and dive bar basements. P.D.Q was kinda like Weird Al, but for classical music. RIP.
The first hang-in-there kitten was in 1971, but it was a different poster design.