Make this year your year. You got this!
It’s a new year. 2024 is in the books, and you’ve either met your writing goals, exceeded them, or fallen short. It doesn’t matter—however you ended up on that front is old news. It’s cliché, of course, setting goals every year, being disappointed at how the goals you’ve set for yourself aren’t quite realized because, like most of us, life gets in the way. Or we’re lacking inspiration. Or you were only able to write a novella instead of that novel you’ve always wanted to write. My advice? Move on. Forget about the past. Start fresh, and start now. Write one page a day and you have 365 pages by this day next year. It really is that easy.
But I get it. I do. It’s easy to say you’ll stick to your goals. So, consider trying something new. Something different. Something that will change up your habits if you’re falling short. But get started on your 2025 writing goals today.
When I need to kickstart my writing, I often read books and articles and interviews about other writers. Biographies of my heroes, whoever they are. Hemingway. Matthiessen. Morrison. Dostoevsky. Lehane. García Márquez. Steinbeck. Need some inspiration? Maybe do the same. Or perhaps you should copy your favorite novel word for word so you get the feeling of what it’s like to write something you admire. Consider visiting your literary hero’s hometown. Or the settings used by your favorite novelist or short story writer, if they wrote using real places. Think outside the box (I just cringed at my own clichéness).
When I was a grad student pursuing my MBA, I had a professor recommend that we, the students, attempt to alter our days somehow. To get out of doing the routine things we did every day to see if anything improved in how we accomplished our daily tasks. I went to grad school at night and worked during the day, as did most of the MBA students in my classes. One of the things I did was that I chose to take different streets to work and to school each day. Something as small as that, as inconsequential as it may seem, actually helped broaden my perspective of the world around me. I saw different people, who became characters (or pieces of them did, anyway) in my fiction. I saw different stores and landscapes and things happening that I wasn’t used to seeing prior to my “stepping out of my comfort zone,” if you will. Give it a try. What can it hurt?
Are you a pantser? Write an outline this time. I typically write a novel straight through, because I’ve discovered that it helps me with the continuity of my story, but it also allows me to enjoy the process of writing. I have, however, given outlines/plotting before starting a novel a chance. It’s not for me—discovering the story and the characters and setting is what I enjoy the most about writing, so I don’t do it. But I do outline after I have my first draft. Once I know what the story is about and where I want it to go, it helps keep me on the road I want to travel down. That said, I did give it a shot. That shot substantiated that outlining a novel beforehand isn’t for me.
Use writing prompts. Writing prompts can often kickstart your writing when you’re stuck on getting started. You may not ultimately stick with the initial idea behind the writing prompt, but if it gets you going, who cares? Here are some writing prompts from Poets & Writers that may work for you. Read through a few, jot them down, and then see if your brain starts kickstarting your fingers. You never know what’ll get the writing going.
Try writing out of your comfort zone. I’ve written fiction all my life, but I now write this blog, and I’ve had some nonfiction published over the years. My focus when I start writing is always on a novel, but I’ve ventured into short stories, and have had some success publishing there as well. For whatever reason I’m naturally drawn to longer works of fiction, but that’s not to say you’re necessarily inclined to the same. Give short shorts a try. Flash Fiction. Poetry. Short stories. Maybe even creative nonfiction. Are you a literary fiction person? Give Thrillers a shot. Romance. Sci-fi. You never know—maybe you’re the next Brandon Sanderson or Gillian Flynn. If you don’t try, you’ll never know.
Do you write by hand? Using a computer? A typewriter? I normally write novels on my laptop, as I type fast and can pretty much get the first draft of a novel done somewhere between three weeks and six months. It takes me years to revise, but that first draft always comes pretty easy for me. But the last novel I wrote I wrote in a notebook. You write differently when you change the method of how you put the words down on the page or screen. I was surprised to see that I only scratched out a few lines here and there in my notebook out of two hundred and thirty pages. When you write by pen or pencil or crayon, your brain slows down and leads you other places that typing may not take you. Give it a go. You’ll get some cramps, but it’s worth it, in my opinion. For what it’s worth, every time I write something in pen before typing it up my readers tell me they enjoy it more than what I’ve written by typing. I’ve done blind tests with my core group of beta readers, and it never fails. Maybe you’re the same.
Do you listen to music while you write? I know a lot of writers who do. Some listen to soft jazz or classical music. Some listen to the Grateful Dead. Others to death metal. I can’t listen to anything at all. I need complete silence. A clock ticking in another room or someone mowing a lawn down the block drives me crazy. I still get the job done, but it requires I put noise cancelling headphones on or plug my ears up with earplugs. I do what I have to do to get the words down no matter what’s going on around me. Distractions are a problem for me. So, I make sure they’re as minimally intrusive as possible.
Whatever you have to do to ensure you’re writing daily do it. If you have children who need your attention, write while they sleep or while they’re at school. Have a babysitter over if you can afford it. Or wake up an hour or more earlier than normal to get your writing in. At one point in my life I had a fulltime job that required 50-60 hours a week, not including the regular travel I had to do, I had two young children, a dog, a spouse, a house that I had to maintain, a workout regimen I needed to keep my sanity, books I wanted to read, etc. You get the picture. So, what did I do? I woke up every morning at 3am and wrote for 4 hours before my kids got up. I sacrificed sleep, obviously, but that’s what I had to do in order to get the words down, so I did it. You do what you have to do when you’re a writer. Excuses are for nonwriters.
Now’s the time for you to make sure you meet your yearly writing goals. Set your schedule now, and stick to it. If that’s one page a day, so be it. If it’s ten minutes a day, make sure you put those ten minutes in no matter what. Excuses are easy; writing isn’t. Are you someone who makes excuses for why you don’t accomplish what you set out to accomplish? Or are you a writer? The choice is yours.
Cully Perlman is a novelist, short story writer, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com