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My writerly resolutions and how I keep them

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A New Year resolution is an opportunity to set a course for the coming year. It might be a new course in many things, in just a few, or just in one thing. It doesn’t have to start at the New Year, though that’s our convention. (“A New Year, a new beginning.”) You don’t even have to call it a resolution if that’s too intimidating. (Bingo cards are popular among Gen Z this year, I’ve learned. You have a card with your ‘not calling them resolutions’ filled in, and you tick them off as you achieve them.)

Whatever you call them, however you score them, there’s a lot to be said for resolutions. (There’s a lot to be said against them too, but I’m going to try to be upbeat in this post!)

New Year Bingo cards - a selection found on-line.

Resolutions or ‘not-resolutions’

A quick search on-line turns up a series of recent articles about resolutions around the English-speaking world. (I’ll put links at the end of this.) Something like half the people surveyed say they will be making, or have already made resolutions for the New Year. The popular ones are, as you might guess, to do with health (get fit/exercise more/lose weight/quit smoking or drinking) and with finance (save money/be more thrifty/make more money/become debt free). But there are self-improvement resolutions, social resolutions, family resolutions.

Asked how likely it is they will keep their resolutions, roughly 70% of respondents say they probably won’t manage to keep them up for more than a few weeks.

That used to be my experience too, but things have changed over the last few years. I won’t say I manage to achieve all the New Year resolutions I make. I don’t. But I’ve definitely got better at keeping some part of several of them. I’ve also got better at not beating myself up for my failures.

My writerly resolution …

In this post I want to describe my process as it applies to my writerly resolutions. I think the principles are transferable to other resolutions in other areas. Maybe you’ll be inspired!

My 2025 writing resolution is: To write daily throughout the year, aiming to have written an average of 1000 words daily by the end of the year (= 365,000 words). This is exactly the same as it was last year, so I’ve got a report card I can share. (Read on for that!)

A few years ago I learned two things that ended up making the difference for me. The difference between giving up on a resolution or seeing it through to the end of the year.

They were, first, to choose my resolutions carefully and express them in language that made them specific. Second to distinguish goals of aspiration from goals of achievement. (Goals of aspiration are the things you want, but where getting them may depend on factors beyond your control. Goals of achievement are things you have a realistic chance of reaching on your own.)

… and how I (try to) keep it

You can see from my resolution how very specific I’ve made it. I have writerly goals of aspiration, of course I do. I aspire to see some of my stories and poems published, not self-published. I aspire to earn some money from my writing. But these are things I have no control over. I cannot decide that a publisher or editor is going to publish my writing, I cannot oblige anyone to pay me for what I write. All I can do is write my stories and poems as well as I can and submit them somewhere they have a chance to be published. That’s something I have a hope of achieving.

The next step is to take one’s goals of achievement and break them down into smaller incremental goals. Things you might achieve in a month, in a week, in a day, and which lead towards achieving your annual goal. So, for my writing that’s the 1000 words a day target.

Resolution review

I keep track of my progress in my daily journal. (I practice Bullet Journaling. That’s also been a help for me since I started four years ago.) At the end of every month I carry out a resolutions review. I look back over the last month and revisit my resolutions. I assess how I’m doing. I do this in positive language. (Less: “Loser! You’ve only managed an average of 300 words a day this month!” More: “Well done for writing an average of 300 words a day, despite those days you were ill/dealing with a family emergency/struggling with the end of the world as we know it.”)

The resolution reviews don’t need to be once a month. They might be once every six weeks, once every quarter. Whatever feels appropriate. Once a month works for me.

At the end of the year, there’s a final opportunity to review. This time I look back over the whole year. I try to give myself a pat on the back for the things I’ve managed, to celebrate my achievements. And I try not to beat myself up about the things I haven’t managed. I revisit my resolutions, remind myself why I wanted to achieve them and ask if they are still important to me. Are these resolutions ones I want to carry over to the coming year? I take it as an opportunity to look again at the language. Did I make the language clear enough? Did I have achievable goals? How might I change the resolutions, the language, the interim goals to make them easier to achieve?

Report Card

Here’s my report card.

In 2024 I wrote on average 825 words each day of the year. I missed writing at all on only 4 days in the year. My best month was (amazingly) November when I wrote 33,341 words and averaged 1111 words a day. (I’m still not sure how I managed that. I was depressed for at least a week mid-month.) My least productive month was April when I only managed 675 words a day on average.

I didn’t manage to achieve my writerly resolution goals in 2024, but I am not down about this. Look what I did achieve! Those 825 words a day on average are now my marker. In 2025, my goal is once again 1000 words a day (and my November result shows I can do it), but I also have a minimum target. I shall be trying to beat my 825 word marker.

It’s a kind of gamification of the New Year resolution, I suppose. Perhaps not so far removed from Gen Z’s bingo cards. But if it works, it works.

In this Bob Satterfield cartoon, a man looks at his list of New Year's resolutions, and amends them to compensate for his having failed each of them. Satterfield's bear mascot is visible, stomping on a page marked "New Year's Resolutions" Acknowledgements: Wikimedia Commons
New Year Resolutions (in 1904)

Acknowledgements and Sources

The featured image, This is Your Year, by Jessica Thames via Pexels.com.
New Year Bingo cards, variously from the Internet, collage by the author
New Year Resolutions (in 1904), by Bob Satterfield via Wikimedia Commons

I promised links to the articles on New Year resolutions I looked at before writing this. Here they are.

If you liked this, you might also like Debbie’s Writing Prompt on the theme of New Year Resolutions: To Resolve or Not to Resolve

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