Happy New Writing Year!

Sharing a few ideas for making it even happier.

I don’t believe in giving things up for the New Year. True, the days are getting longer, and just this morning the sun is sparkling in South London, but here in the northern hemisphere there's an awful lot of dark-and-cold about. So it seems to me that choosing to think in terms of denial and deprivation, is asking to fail.

And I’m not convinced that even positive resolutions are the answer either, since they so often awake one’s Inner Resisting Teenager (at least - it’s not just me, is it?). More importantly, your Inner Perfectionist gets a buzz from vowing to ‘have a total reset’ or ‘sort myself out’ or ‘finally finish that trilogy’, or some similarly huge goal. The fact that the biggest buzzes comes from the biggest goals ought to be (but so often isn’t) a warning bell about the unlikelihood that you will actually see it through. Again, it’s setting yourself up to fail.

Instead, I’m posting a young forest of Trees of Life from the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City, for the sheer joy of them.

But many a mickle makes a muckle, as the Scots say, and a few small changes to your practical habits and ways of thinking - not giving up, but taking up a few small things - can make a much bigger difference than you’d think.

I’ve come up with some ideas, and in the Happy New Year hope that we can collectively make this post a bit of a resource for writers, I’ve opened the comments to all subscribers. Feel free to comment with what small changes you have decided on to improve your writing life; there’s very possibly someone out there for whom it’s exactly what they need.

• Walk up a hill every day, or do what it takes to get your heart rate up a bit for 25 minutes. You may not care about your bodily health, but the brain’s blood vessels fur up as easily as the body’s do, and a writer’s brain needs to be in full working order. What’s more, if you pop a plot problem instead of a phone into your pocket, you may very well come home with the problem solved.

• Practice staying inside your head, because that’s where the writing is. In this clamorous world, it takes a little more forethought and focus, but it can be done. Not least, on that walk. (That links to a post I’d completely forgotten I wrote. I’m glad to have found it again!)

• Allow yourself to take your writing seriously. Writing is (one of) our biggest loves, but the ratio of effort to material reward is so very unpromising, it’s easy to feel in this post-Protestant, capitalist world that it’s self-indulgent. You may have got over the idea that you ‘ought’ to give up altogether, but your Inner Calvinist or Inner Neoliberal may still be very good at self-sabotage, in his/her own guise or dressed up as some other helpful but misguided soul.

• Allow yourself to take the tools of your trade seriously, from the notebooks that suit you best to the software (such as Scrivener) which doesn’t get in the way of your writing, and the chair that doesn’t wreck your back. This is one of the wisest ideas in Carol Lloyd’s very wise book Creating a Life Worth Living - and there are ways to keep the cost down. The second-hand office furniture shop might sell you an office chair on the understanding you can return it if it doesn’t help, and when it comes to notebooks, it may be too late (or too early) for your Christmas list, but when’s your birthday?

• Don’t forget to be kind to your writerly self. Writing may be hard in terms of work, and in terms of working with difficult stuff, but that’s a reason to be less, not more, hair-shirt-ish in other matters. Of course tough love may be needed at times, but double-check you’re not just giving your Inner Critic permission to bully you. (That’s a terrific new link on this topic, by the way.)

• Make a regular appointment to write. For the reasons I explored in that post, ring-fence a little piece of time as essential, just as you would the time for having a shower or cooking the tea. The written result doesn’t have to be good, long, experimental, developmental or, indeed, have any obvious virtue - but if you keep on, these little things on which nothing is riding may begin to acquire those virtues - or even some virtue that you didn’t even know you sought to acquire. As Ray Bradbury says in Zen and the Art of Writing (highly recommended, by the way): ‘Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.’

• Play some yoga-for-writers games, and discover which ones work for you.

• Try some coaching questions for your writing self.

• Take a poetry course if you’re a prose writer, or one on writing drama or filmscripts. Here’s why. If you’re a poet, take a prose course: not necessarily fiction, but certainly one involving storytelling and human voices. Either way, go for the course whose content is new-to-you enough to make your mouth water, not necessarily the one you think you ‘ought’ to take, nor not the comfy one whose content and outcome you can.

Please do put your own mickles in the comments - and Happy New Year! I’m so grateful for all the super-supporting, supporting, subscribing, following or simply reading This Itch of Writing as we roll into our second year together on Substack. I couldn’t - and I wouldn’t - do it without you!

A version of this post first appeared on Typepad.