Writing Resolutions That Actually Work

We set out with such good intentions for our writing every New Year.  We make writing resolutions that we truly do intend to follow through on.  We make commitments to change our lives, to realize the full potential of our artistic selves and to emerge into the role that we want to play in the world.  We make these writing resolutions with total seriousness. We're not joking around when we make a New Year's resolution.  But for most writers, it’s easy to start the year off really strong with your writing, and then a couple months down the road, find yourself back where you started.  Why does this happen?  We fail to keep our New Year’s writing resolutions for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason is what I call the Flash Flood Principle.  Here's the Flash Flood Principle: If you go to a barren desert, and suddenly there’s a giant rainstorm, you don't end up with a beautiful river that's going to feed the fields and transform that desert into a lush garden.  What you get instead is a flash flood.  You get all this rain pouring down with nowhere to go. It erupts over everything, it knocks a bunch of stuff out, and then the sand just reabsorbs the moisture. It disappears as if it had never been there.  It's my belief that when a lot of writers make their New Year's resolutions, they're actually making flash flood resolutions. They're trying to change everything about their writing at once in such a big way that it's actually not sustainable.  In the desert of their creativity, they've brought a giant rainstorm of writing, but there's nowhere to channel all that energy because the landscape has not been prepared for all the rain. For so many writers, creativity is like an out of control storm in the desert. It comes out of nowhere in a torrential downpour, and just as quickly disappears, having made no meaningful change upon the landscape. Whereas if you just turn on a little drop of water into a desert, and you just allow those drops to keep coming in a little concentrated place, eventually you get a little rivulet.  If you turn on a little bit more water, eventually that little rivulet is going to become a little stream.  If you turn on a little bit more water, eventually that stream is going to become a brook.  If you just keep that brook coming, it's going to be a mighty river. At that point, if you send a giant thunderstorm, the water has somewhere to go. It all ends up channeling into that river, allowing that river to flow with even more force and power.  As you're making your New Year's resolutions this year for writing, I want you to ask yourself, Am I making a flash flood resolution? Or am I building a riverbed? Let's talk about how you build that riverbed for your writing. The answer for most writers is not to lock yourself in a room for a weekend of non-stop writing. You might be able to sustain that kind of writing commitment for one weekend, but can you really write like that every weekend? The chances are, your life isn't going to suddenly change overnight so that all your weekends become available just for writing, which means as wonderful as such a weekend could be, it’s not going to help you build the rhythm you need to create a new habit. Furthermore, you probably don't have the skills or stamina as a writer yet to sustain that kind of intense weekend where all you do is write. You probably don't have the support system you need to sustain that kind of writing. Your family, your partner, your kids, your friends: they're not necessarily going to understand why you suddenly disappeared from the world and plan to disappear from the world every single weekend.