My New Year (Writing) Resolutions
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Every year my wife and I sit down over a few drinks and work up a list of about 15 resolutions for the coming twelve months. There’s no pressure to complete the list, but we are both pretty convinced that vocalising goals early in the year helps to get us off on the right footing. We don’t complete all of them – usually only about half tbh – but that still means that come late December we can look back and see what we succeeded in – a clink of the glasses – and what we fell short on – a slice of regret or a solid guffaw.
It’s often the ones that didn’t work out – my ‘learning to cook’ one is a near constant source of hilarity – that teaches us the most though. You can’t get much beyond beginning to learn a language in a year. And if you are learning an instrument, that isn’t something you should inflict on your friends (unless these are people you don’t like having over for dinner) unless you’ve been practising steadily all year. What about for writing though? I’m assuming no aspiring author dedicates an hour after a friendly dinner to private readings of her reworking of The Outlaw Josey Wales from the point of view of the protagonist’s horse. So two things from here. Resolutions need to be realistic. They also, often, should be nurtured in the relative privacy of a corkboard just above the writer’s eye-line or of a rarely read blog. And the results of these resolutions may best be served cold.
Which brings me to this year’s set, and my decision to split my year’s goals into a writing and non-writing list. With most of the country in a post-Christmas daze and 2018 wheezing its last, my wife asked me if I had given any thought to mine. I quickly answered writing a story in a new genre, caught the eye-roll, and, utilising quick-thinking far out of character, added something garbled about treating my nearest and dearest better every day. She wasn’t buying it for a second. And I, not wanting to sound like a broken record / scratched CD / erratically streamed Creative Penn podcast download, decided that this would be the year of writing and non-writing resolution lists. So here, in no particularly well-organised order, is the former. I hope these are relatively achievable goals, but I won’t beat myself up too much if I don’t succeed. And a warning here – I’m aiming for 10.
Write something in a new genre
When I decided to write a novel, I took time deciding what genre – crime as it turned out – would suit me most. I then read pretty much every first novel in a series I could – Billingham, Ellroy, Nesbo, Chandler… I firmly believe you need to read as much as you can before you turn your hand to it. Bathe in the different worlds, learn the MCs until you almost imagine them chatting to you, check out the obsessions of not just the characters, but of the writers themselves. Was Hammett a Communist? MacDonald an environmentalist? Why is Billingham so good at describing the (relatively) rarely portrayed victims of crime? Why was Christie such a snob? So before I can start this, I need to read. Even before that, I need to decide what the new genre will be. It clearly won’t be romantic fiction – I’m not into the genre and I’m not going to be a fraud. This will be the big one – the white whale, the Alpine peak, the Ivan Drago.
Finish Book 4 in the ‘Choi’ series
At time of writing I’m at 36,000 in my latest WIP. I know where I’m going, I even know the outline of Book 5 dammit (the last one in the series), but damned if I really know how to get to that finish line. And I’m facing an unhealthy dose of Imposter syndrome to boot. I probably shouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
Write at least one shorter story
I’m generally an underwriter. Often stories will start with me thinking I can get this done in about twenty thousand. Then it’s thirty. Then a side character develops a sudden desire to get more involved in the story. By the time I’m ready for my final beta reader I’ve not-so-suddenly hit 80,000. How did that happen? Was it the right thing to happen? In the world of self-publishing, where the shorter form seems to be king, I feel the need to rein things in. So no, voluble side character, I’m not interested in your input.
Attend at least two writing workshops
This year’s Wellington Lit Crawl gave me the chance to sit in on a talk by dark fantasy author Steff Green – https://www.steffmetal.com/. She’s interesting, insightful, and gives an unvarnished view of what it’s like in the world of Self Publishing. She taught me that although I know more than some, there’s plenty I don’t know anything about at all. The Writing Community has a lot of experts out there – nobody is an expert in absolutely everything – and any workshops done by Community members are resources that should be utilised by all of us – neophytes or hardened veterans. There’s always a nugget to be found.
Read better
I touched on this in my blog entry https://lpring.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/a-good-reads-year/ last week. I got too involved in the chase to get to 50 books (my initial goal was 24) and ended up choosing books primarily for their page number manageability rather than for their content. I still read well – James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is a masterfully tight 160 pages of harrowing emotion – but this year I’m going for the big beasts – plot complexity, plenty of characters, the deeper end of the pool. I’ve started with The Terror by Dan Simmons, which is brilliant, and one goal I will achieve this year is to finish either Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Honest. Not both though. I need to learn to cook.
Avoid NaNoWriMo
The November write-until-you-drop spectacular is definitely for some people, but it is definitely not for me. I cannot let that weight of unedited pages go ignored. I quit on November 20 this year with a 30,000 word mess that I’m still trying to trudge through. For me, it’s edit a little and edit often. It was a good experience while it lasted from the perspective of being in a community and having challenges such as set timed writing periods, but it isn’t something I’ll be re-visiting.
Be less cynical about Twitter
I am a cynical sod at the heart of it, something I was reminded of only a few days ago when a friend – talking about his kids – mentioned how their delight at opening presents was something he hoped they would never lose. Because, after all, aren’t those of us without cynicism, without that little voice questioning everybody’s motivations and intentions, among the happiest of people? Twitter can be a mess of a place if you aren’t following the right people, but there are some wonderful people on there who only want to give back what they can. There’s also so much to learn – about writing, about technology, about the ridiculous hours people in some countries have to work if they are in retail or teaching. Some good. Some bad. Most interesting.
Blog better
Which you might find pretty ironic considering the subjective, stream of consciousness that has been inflicted on you by this particular post. Don’t worry – I’m almost finished. It’s been a year where I’ve blogged where space – both geographic and time – allows. There’s a severe lack of consistency in that, and it is something that needs to be remedied. It doesn’t matter if nobody is reading; in fact, often we should blog exactly as if no-one is. For me, blogging offers a different form of writing in addition to offering mental time away from other projects and concerns. Writer’s block? Blog and forget about it. Blogging can also be an inspiration. Get the words down, Liam. Anything could come from them.
Don’t give up
Because that WIP I’m frustrated with won’t do anything in a file on my desktop or in the bottom shelf of my desk (it’s actually on the floor at the moment). Because if this is something you want to do, regardless of the lack of success or congratulations, it’s something you should. I’m sure that nobody needs to be preached to, but the end of 2019 will hopefully come for all of us. And if I begin the next decade wondering what might have been – even if it’s only a sliver as I cradle a glass of red wine while the clock ticks down to midnight – the year will be gone and what (largely unquantifiable) progress I have made will be lost. Netflix will still be there. So will the Barclay’s Premier League – Arsenal will still flatter to deceive and eventually implode. I have a beautiful, charming and (most importantly for this topic) supportive wife who allows me time to talk about book covers, plot problems, social welfare systems in South Korea, and the like. I have a job which gives me time to breathe. I’m luckier than most. I have opportunities.
Did I make it to 10? A quick scroll upwards tells me not quite. I could think some more, or I could close this out and give some deserved focus to the Dave Brubeck collection I’ve had on for background. Reaching a target doesn’t matter; I’m writing. It’s something I’ve rarely been paid for, but payment comes in many forms – increased creativity, a desire to tell a story, to put forward a (potentially) half-baked philosophy, or to build on a hope that someone, somewhere will be entertained. There are other forms of payment. Those are mine. I’ll read this on December 31st, 2019. I’ll give my wife a New Year’s kiss and raise a glass to the year (and decade together) that was. Roll on the challenges. Keep smiling. Keep typing.
