Your next writing year

How to start the new year inspired to write

“I almost canceled our session today because I haven’t done anything since we last spoke,” said every single one of my clients at least once during our coaching series.

“That’s ok,” I always respond. “Let’s start with what you did do.”

What pours out from this question is always a list that shocks my client. The same is true for you regarding this past year.

You’ve done much more this year than you think.

Once we reach December, most of us are ready to chuck out the current year in favor of a fresh new start and a year in which we haven’t failed at all (yet.)

Before you throw December out with the bathwater, let’s take a short pause, along with a blank piece of paper.

Take five minutes — set a timer, and write on this question:

What did I do with my writing this year?

I want you to include everything you can think of.

Did you read that craft book you’d had in your TBR pile for years? That goes on the list.
Did you finally start a writing group with friends? Ditto.
Anything that bears even a tangential relationship to writing gets added here.

I find it helps to go month by month to reflect back, or you can go topic by topic.

What did you:

• Read?

• Experiment with?

• Outline?

• Draft?

• Revise?

• Submit?

• Daydream about?

• Research?

• Decide to let go of?

• Learn?

All of these things are part of your writing life. And as VE Schwab wisely said , writing is about way more than just typing.

If you’re on a roll and five minutes isn’t enough, keep going.

How do you feel now?

Take a moment to look over this page of things you’ve done for your writing over the past year. I am willing to bet cold hard cash that the list is longer than you expected.

We are so quick to slam ourselves just because the results we got don’t look exactly like the results we anticipated.

Maybe you didn’t get a big five traditional book deal this year, but you DID find a love of flash fiction and submitted entries to several contests. Yes!

Perhaps you didn’t finish a novel, but you got an essay published. Fantastic!

If you feel ho-hum about your accomplishments from the year, don’t compare them to what you thing you should have done.

Imagine reading your list to you of five years ago.

Would that you be impressed about your flash fiction submissions, or your contest entries, or the new direction you found for your character? All of these things are worthy of celebration.

So…time to celebrate.

Before we go any further, please take a moment to acknowledge the hard work you’ve done over the past year. No matter what the results were, you did make a real effort, and you’ve learned so much.

This doesn’t have to cost anything, by the way. Yes, you can treat yourself to something as a celebration, but taking a reading break at an unusual time of day, playing some favorite music turned up for proper dancing, or even wearing something you save for special occasions can give you the celebration feeling without any extra expense.

We need to feel positive to get results.

Why am I insisting you list what you did in 2023 and to celebrate it before we make any new plans?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Because there are real reasons for this.

If you feel totally shitty about something, how often do you want to do it?
Not very often, right?

The things I know I am terrible at, I avoid doing. I’m not good at sports. In fact, despite my family all being naturally gifted, I am the one who has gotten hit in the face with every piece of sporting equipment out there. (Tennis balls, basketballs, dodge balls, badminton birdies, and even —one terrible day — the bleachers. Most embarrassing black eye ever.) When I think about playing group or team sports, I know my terrible depth perception will prevent me from having any fun at all.

So when the opportunity comes up, I skip the sports.

People give up on writing if they think they’re ‘bad at it.’ They’re not.

Culturally, we hold any creative writing in a special exceptions category. We write all the time. How many emails do you write in a day? How many texts?

Now, more than ever, being a part of modern society requires us to write constantly. We need to convince people of something’s importance, share information, stories, and transmit emotion across distance, all in writing.

So what makes you uniquely bad at writing creatively, if you already have the above skills in regular life?

Reframing success:

We have grown up in an education system designed to efficiently sort people into boxes of what they can best contribute to society. And guess what? The whole process is motivated by what society needs.

Arts programs are receiving less and less funding, while students are pushed into other fields deemed more “important” or “lucrative” by our families and guidance counselors. Is it true that it’s hard to make a full-time living as a writer? Yes.

Does that mean writing isn’t worth doing? Absolutely not.

Once you’ve looked at what you have accomplished in the past year, you can see where you got stuck and what you’ve learned more clearly.

Only now are you ready to set your goals for next year.

Seeing what you were able to do in a year will help you set intentions that more accurately reflect your energy levels. Did you plan to write a trilogy in 2023, but only got through a solid draft of book one? Perhaps 2024’s goal is to revise the book and prepare it to submit to agents or think about how you want to publish it yourself.

Want some help?

Each year, I create a planner download that walks you through reflecting on the previous year’s writing and includes prompts, templates, and a blank calendar for you to map out the year to come.

I’d love to share it with you so you have the most wonderful 2024 possible.

You can get your copy here:

Please share one win from the past year and one dream for the new year in the comments below: