How I set writing resolutions
Three goals to keep your writing moving forward.
Dear friends,
By now, one week into 2024, you may feel you’ve heard enough about resolutions. Many of us start the new year with a burst of determination, but that energy can fade fast. If—as my friend Gretchen Rubin has noted—most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions by February 15, what’s the point of making them at all?
Forget about diet and exercise if you want, but if you’re a writer, you need to make writing resolutions. Writing isn’t like other careers in that there’s no defined path to success—we each make our own. And in the 25 years I’ve been a professional writer, editor, and teacher, it’s become clear that opportunities very rarely fall out of the sky. When success happens, it’s because we make it happen.
So I start each year off with some planning. I think about where I am, what my goals are for the coming year, and what I need to do to achieve them. I also write down what I accomplished in the previous year. I do all this on paper, in my journal or planner, but electronic methods work too.
The most important thing I’ve learned about goal-setting—probably from the #amwriting podcast, which has a great new year’s episode every year—is that goals must be actionable to be useful. “Publish novel” is not a useful goal: too many factors are beyond our control. “Write 1,000 words a day,” “query agents,” and “identify readers to provide feedback” are goals that we can potentially achieve on our own.
Here are the three things I do year after year to keep my work moving forward:
Write something new or write for someone new. As a freelance journalist, I’m constantly looking for ways to expand my reach. So each year I try to pitch to a new publication, or pitch a new kind of piece to a publication I already write for. I haven’t always made this a priority—last year, for instance, I focused on finishing my book about Anne Frank rather than putting energy into freelancing. But when I have prioritized journalism, it’s paid off. In 2017, I made it a goal to pitch a long-form profile, and ended up landing this piece about Claire Messud in the New York Times Magazine. For next year, I’m hoping to find a home for a new nonfiction piece, a reported essay different from anything I’ve written before.
Also, it’s important to write for new places because the old ones may disappear! Some of the magazines and newspapers I started out writing for no longer exist.
Write something scary. Not things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scary, but something that involves risk: a new form, a new subject, a new depth of emotion. Last year, this meant leaning in to the more experimental aspects of my Anne Frank book. Did some of what I wrote prove to be too off-the-wall? Yes. But working through that was essential to the book’s process.
Take stock. Especially for those of us who tend toward self-criticism, it’s easy to downplay our accomplishments. Looking back at what I published last year, I found myself thinking, “I didn’t get much done”—until I remembered that I had finished a book! Other highlights:
publishing this review of Nina Siegal’s brilliant book The Diary Keepers in The Washington Post, a publication I hadn’t written for in years
creating and teaching a new seminar focusing on contemporary politics and the novel
researching and writing a fun piece about queer readings of Frankenstein for The New Yorker
traveling to Vermont to record a podcast about Shirley Jackson for On the Road with Penguin Classics (first installment here; second coming soon)
On my list for next year: getting my Anne Frank book ready for publication, continuing to develop this newsletter, and exploring a new book idea.
Speaking of which: for this new project, I’m looking for people who teach Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, on a high school or college level. If this is you or someone you know, please be in touch!
What about you—what are your writing resolutions? Send me an email or let me know in the comments.
What I’m reading
A few favorite books from last year:
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish. In this gorgeous, hypnotic novel, a British historian nearing the end of her career realizes that a stash of centuries-old documents were written not by a rabbi, as everyone else assumes, but by an unknown woman scholar. “The purpose of historical fiction isn’t just to add a pleasant emotional embroidery to what we already know about history,” Kadish wrote in an essay for The Paris Review. “It’s to tell the dangerous stories—the human truths that fly in the face of propriety or power.” She fills in the gaps in women’s literary history by creating a figure who plausibly might have existed, meticulously recreating the world of seventeenth-century Amsterdam through careful research and vivid, humane storytelling.
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. I’ve tried to read this novel at least twice before and given up: it was too abstract, obscure, inaccessible. This time, something clicked. By the time I made it, breathlessly, to the last pages, I understood that the inaccessibility is the point: the book is a puzzle whose pieces don’t fall into place until the very end. (In fact, you may not even realize they’re pieces of the same puzzle.) The radical brevity with which Hazzard can convey depths of emotion is a marvel.
The Year of the Puppy by Alexandra Horowitz and Pack of Two by Caroline Knapp. As many of you know, we got a puppy two months ago. He is an adorable, sweet-natured creature who makes my heart explode; he also charges at every person or dog he encounters with uncontainable enthusiasm and appears determined to chew the legs off our kitchen table. I was heartened to learn that even Horowitz, a dog behaviorist, is often frustrated by her puppy. At the same time, as Knapp writes, “There is nothing quite like a puppy to wrench your mind away from the darkness.” While our relationship with Obi hasn’t yet reached the symbiotic union of souls that she and other dog-lovers describe, I hold out the hope that we will get there, once he stops trying to eat our clothes.
And finally … The Path to Power and Means of Ascent by Robert Caro. In last January’s newsletter, I announced my intention to read all four (to date) volumes of Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, which, at the rate of around eight pages a day, I projected would take all year. In reality, I made it through two of the books. There was a lot that I loved about them, especially the first, with its remarkable evocation of the Texas Hill Country and the literally backbreaking labor of the women who lived there, whose lives LBJ changed by bringing electricity to the region. But the second, which is devoted, in its entirety, to LBJ’s (almost certainly stolen) victory in the 1948 Texas Senatorial primary, amounted to way too much detail for me. An unpopular opinion, I know, but this book could have been usefully abridged.
While I was engaged in this project, Twitter imploded. I had been tweeting my thoughts and enjoying dialogue with an interesting group of readers. Without anyone to share it with, I couldn’t get motivated to start the third book. I may try again this year on Threads. Or I may just give up on social media entirely. The loss of Twitter—a real boon to literary conversation—is bitter.
Israeli/Palestinian book club
An excellent conversation about Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail took place in this Thread! Please feel free to jump in if you haven’t already. Is there interest in a real-time Zoom meeting to discuss the book? Email me or comment below.
For the next read, a number of you suggested David Grossman’s To the End of the Land, about an Israeli mother grieving the death of her soldier son. It’s longer than the Shibli novel, so it may require more than a month. But what’s the rush? Let’s take our time. This novel is readily available in libraries, bookstores, etc.
Please keep your suggestions coming. We’ll choose another Palestinian novel after the Grossman.
Where I’ll be
On February 11, I’m giving a talk at Fordham University about the censorship of Anne Frank’s diary, past and present. It’s both in-person and online, but if you come to Fordham, you’ll get to join me on a walk through their exhibit about book censorship from the medieval period on. For either option, register here.
Wishing you all a productive and peaceful 2024—
Ruth
Seeing your approach to goal setting is quite affirming. Your processes reinforce what I am trying to do -- although you are at a quite different level!! Thanks for sharing! Much appreciated.
Ruth, I loved this edition of the newsletter. The Grossman book was wonderful. And I agree with this approach -- new publications or a new kind of writing each year, more queries. Thank you so much.