Greetings, writers—
Every year I make New Year’s resolutions of some sort, and every year I fail at keeping them. No matter: I love the tradition anyway. I feel about New Year’s the way I feel about any given morning, albeit on a grander scale: it’s an exciting new beginning—a chance to do things right this time.
That I generally disappoint myself in one way or another by 11 a.m. on the average day does not impact my enthusiasm for the next morning; perhaps, I think, this day will be different. This day I will live my best life. I have no such illusions about resolutions, because I’ve bailed on all of them to some degree or another, thus I know I will again. But! By resolving to write more letters (as I’ve done every January 1st for a decade), I’ve increased my letter-writing from zero letters per year to five or six letters per year. It’s not as many as I’d like, but it’s better than nothing.
Same with “drink more water.” Yes, this should be a simple thing, but I struggle with it (WC Fields: “I don’t drink water. Fish fuck in it.”) Still: after years of saying I’ll be better at drinking plain old boring water (instead of, say, exciting sparkling water), I am indeed a little bit better. Baby steps.
Let’s say that you’ve made a resolution to write more this year, which I hope you have. Because writing is good for you, for one thing, and for another, presumably you want to be doing more writing, or else you wouldn’t be reading a Substack that’s 80% writing prompts.
Speaking of 80%, supposedly that’s the percentage of people who quit keeping their resolutions by the end of February.
But there are ways, says Science, to make resolutions somewhat easier to keep. Here are a couple of them.
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