2024 Writing Resolutions
I love making space at the turning of the year to reflect on what the past year afforded and to set some intentions for the next. I’ll write briefly about tools that I used to set my goals for 2024, and then I’ll run through some writing goals with the hopes that announcing them in a public space will help me to stay accountable!
Tools
I recently posted about the Year in Review, which is an annual check-in with my husband’s family that I find grounding and meaningful. (You can find a link to a free template of the table that we use in that post.) That document is a key place where I think holistically about life, the year, things I want to keep on with, and ways I want to redirect, including with my writing.
At some point this year, I discovered Ninja Writers. I’m guessing that I first found them in the summer when I was starting to practice more narrative nonfiction and fiction writing. I’ve been on their email list for a while, and if my experience says anything, they do an incredibly effective job of promoting engagement through calls-to-action to engage with their free and paid services. I am following along with their free Fresh Start Workshop that they hold every year between Christmas and New Year’s Day. They have some helpful worksheets that they’ve circulated along with daily calls for thinking through goals and making plans for the year. I especially liked the day focused on creating an editorial calendar for the year.
Writing Goals
Continue Morning Pages. I’ve dabbled in morning pages since my college roommate introduced me to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way sometime in the early 2010s, and I’ve been writing them pretty consistently since I first made it all the way through The Artist’s Way in the summer of 2022. I find this practice to be so useful for forcing me to confront things I’m avoiding. This has a practical benefit, because when I am avoiding thinking about or doing something I need to do, I often engage in self-destructive habits like procrastination-eating or doing all of the NYT Games. (Literally all of them.) I don’t care that much about being productive all of the time and do enjoy a crossword now and then, but I want to be intentional and mindful about it. The morning pages help a lot with that.
Review my Morning Pages. I was good about this for a while, but then I picked up a journal with skinny lines and had to write a LOT to fill the pages, and it was taking so long to read once I finished it that I gave up. I want to start reviewing these regularly again and am going to try to schedule time for it whenever I finish a notebook. I’m also going to try to be smarter with my notebook selection.
Submit an article to a peer reviewed journal. I got a grant from my university to support work on a journal article this academic year. I have made good progress but probably have another forty hours of work to do on it before I can submit it. I want to get this out by the end of April.
Present a version of said journal article at a conference. The paper was accepted to a conference in March, so I just need to put together a shorter, tighter version of the article. And I want to make a decent slideshow to go with it.
Write a book proposal for my academic book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Leftist. I have done a lot of bits and pieces of work on a proposal over the past couple of years, mainly relying on Laura Portwood-Stacer’s The Book Proposal Book. I did her Find a Perfect-Fit Publisher workshop a year or two (or so?) ago, and as a part of making my editorial plan for the year with the folks at Ninja Writers, I reviewed the proposal requirements for the publisher I’m most interested in. It doesn’t require as much work as I had thought, so I am going to try to get a completed proposal submitted by the end of the summer.
Publish a blog post to my website + Medium at least once a week. I am bursting with ideas for blog posts, so I may exceed this goal by a lot. Or, I may get tired of it. I want to try it for a year, though, and see what happens.
Contribute to the film section of the Counter Arts publication on Medium at least once a month. I did not watch many movies last year, and when I did watch good ones, I found them so rich. Since the baseline viewing in our household at the moment is Ms. Rachel and random Roblox videos from YouTube, watching Showing Up or Poor Things was like getting a deep tissue massage. I want to watch a movie a week–like, actually fully paying attention to it–and I want to write about at least one film a month for Counter Arts, which has a great film writing community.
Do ten minutes of writing practice toward my satirical campus novel a day. I have been joking about writing a satirical campus novel pretty much since I first read Jane Smiley’s Moo in 2017. I kid no longer: I am writing a satirical campus novel! In fact, it might be a series of novels, because there is so much grist for the mill. I read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones recently, and it helped take the pressure off what writing practice can look like. I’m going through the exercises in Robert Ray’s The Weekend Novelist, which I picked up used at our local Indie and love so far. So I have mashed up the Ninja Writers’ 10-minutes-a-day practice, Goldberg’s fast and loose (but Zen) approach to writing practice, and exercises from Ray’s book into short guided writing time. It’s been fun so far, and at this rate, maybe I’ll have drafted a novel within five years. :)
Make back the $50 I spent in order to be able to make money on Medium. Hey, I’m already $1.19 of the way there, folks! At this rate, I maaaayyy need to write way more than one post a week in order to achieve this goal. We’ll call it a stretch goal.
Last Thoughts
I really like writing. As I’ve heard is the case for many people in the humanities, I had terrible grad-school-induced writing anxiety, and it’s taken a long time to work through. For the past ten-ish years, I’ve pretty much only done morning pages and academic writing. Blogging this month has been extremely fun, and I am excited to incorporate more avocational writing and to experiment with more genres in 2024.
Good luck to everyone with their writing this year!
