Should You Set New Year’s Writing Resolutions?

Knowing that this blog post would be published just before New Year’s, I thought to myself, I should write a New Year’s themed blog post (just like the Christmas-themed blog post that was published last week just before Christmas). I’ve written about new year’s writing resolutions before, setting four goals at the start of 2016 (that I pretended weren’t goals to relieve a little bit of the pressure on myself) and writing at the end of 2016 about how successful I’d been (about 50/50 – I achieved some of them, failed entirely at others and achieved things during the year that I’d never even thought about when I was setting those goals).

I wasn’t sure I wanted to set goals again. Setting goals and then failing is demoralising. And I always fail at goals, especially ones that have definitive and relatively short deadlines. More often than not, I accomplish them but long after any arbitrary time frames I’ve set. That sums me up really. I’m easygoing. I’m laidback. I’m not ambitious. I’m happy to succeed over years rather than months and pressure to do it sooner doesn’t make it happen. In fact, it makes it less likely to happen.

So then I asked myself, Should I be setting New Year’s writing resolutions? Should I be setting goals at all?

Clearly, I have set and met goals in the past. I wanted to write books. I have. I wanted to publish them. I have. I wanted to earn money from my writing. I have (although I’d like to earn more). I know a lot of people would look at my life and say I could have achieved so much more and sooner if I’d set and stuck to goals with deadlines. But I don’t know if I would be any happier than I am now.

Almost all of my biggest achievements (the ones that are important in my mind) have come from a reasonably spontaneous place. Yes, writing can take a long time but when I published my first two books, I made the decision to publish and did it all within the space of a week or two. When I was shortlisted for the 2016 Text Prize, it was a competition I entered on the spur of the moment simply because I had an unpublished book ready that met the criteria. I like that kind of spontaneity because it means I don’t have a long time to get my hopes up and I don’t have huge investments of time and effort to be regretted if everything doesn’t go the way I’d hoped.

When I really thought about what I wanted to achieve in the coming year, it all came back to balance. I returned to full-time, non-writing work this year out of financial necessity and spent almost four months not writing a single thing while I adjusted to this different routine. I was able to pay my home loan and put food on the table but I was just surviving, not thriving in the way I had done during my previous three years of being a full-time writer. I knew I’d done it in the past, work full-time and write plenty, but for those four months I just couldn’t remember how. Why was it that things that had seemed easy a few years ago now seemed impossible?

Because I’m getting older. I’m getting more tired. I’m only months away from being officially diagnosed with arthritis. (I thought I was putting on weight but actually I was getting swollen from my body attacking itself. Yay!?) My dad’s two best friends died. My cat died. My stepmother needed help writing, designing and printing several batches of marketing flyers. I spent a lot of time with my grandfather (just like I have since my grandmother died). I babysat. I took on freelance editing work. In short, my life was getting in the way of my writing.

So my goal for the next year is balance. I will continue working but I will also continue writing. I will take care of myself so that I can keep doing both. Life will happen and probably keep getting in the way but it’s better than the alternative of life not happening.

And what about you? Should you set New Year’s writing (or life) resolutions? Only you can answer that. If you respond well to a little bit or a lot of pressure, then maybe goals with a deadline will help you achieve what you want. If you don’t respond well to pressure, then specific goals may be counterintuitive. Whatever you decide, it has to be right for you.

For all writers, the best advice has to be to just keep writing, just keep writing, just keep writing… In the end, you’ll get somewhere. It may not be where you planned or when but sometimes that destination is better than the one you thought you wanted.

Happy new writing year to all the writers out there and happy new reading year to all the readers who support them!