Soliciting for ideas for blog posts, I was asked, “How do you create a writing practice?” and “How do you make writing a habit?” And I thought to myself, “Self, you used to wonder that, and you did it. So, what finally worked?” To that end, I went back to my old Livejournal and checked out my New Years Resolution posts.
My New Year’s Resolution for 2003 was “This is the year I finally publish something!”
This was a terrible resolution, but toward that end, I subscribed to Writer’s Market and sent stories and poems out, racking up some rejection letters.
I didn’t publish anything in 2003. My resolution for 2004 was “Apply myself vigorously to writing in my spare moments.”
There’s no way of telling if I did that. 2005’s Resolution blog post lists:
Re-write Mot and TGA. [These are novels.]Send out at least one story a month to rejection-land.
Be less negative.
I adore the juxtaposition of “rejection-land” and “be less negative.” Knowing me, it was intentional. I did not submit a story a month successfully, by my own account, though I think I did finish the novel revisions.
2006’s Resolution was to submit every week, and I marked down that I kept it up until May. I sold my first story (to a semi-pro market) in 2006.
Takeaway: Submit once a week was, somehow, a more successful goal than submit once a month. Perhaps because a month gives you too much time to forget you were going to do it?
On to 2007!
Finish synopsis of TGA, send it to Tor.
Query Agents — find some agents to query
Work on projects a little bit each day, as soon as I get home from work, before taking a nap or playing computer games
OH HEY. That’s actually my habit nowadays. I recall napping after work was one of my main vices. I’d get home, nap, eat dinner, and then cry that my day was over and nothing had been done. I don’t recall when I finally kicked the habit. I note on my end-of-year post, “I did pretty much the opposite of this. Worst resolution-keeping year on record.”
2008: Submit something for publication every month.
Oh, self!
2009: the year in which I declare “I will make my resolutions quantifiable and achievable” for the first time. YES. This is a good thing. Though I then went right ahead and beat that broken bad horse “Submit something for publication every month.” And then the NOT entirely achievable “Finish all projects I start” and I finished off with “bring paper or laptop with me everywhere and write in those situations in which I now read (waiting for bus, eating alone)”
HEY! That’s another one of my actual habits. I almost always have some means of writing on my person, so that I can write if I’m stuck waiting. I’m sure I didn’t succeed at it right away, but eventually I did make that a habit. It meant I read less, but I’ve found places for reading when I can’t write. (Audiobooks on my bike, novels in the bathtub, reading a page or two in bed before sleep.)
2010: “Work on a project, chore, or exercise for one hour before I allow myself a nap, tv show, or pleasure reading. I know from experience that if I have a project planned immediately after work, and do it, I am more alert the rest of the evening and get other stuff done as well.” also “Keep writing, probably on lunch breaks or while waiting for the bus.”
OK so I was still working in that ‘work right after getting home’ thing. Not successful all the time, but I’d done it enough to notice a difference in my attitude on days I did.
NB: my annual “Books I read this year” post was 38 books, down from 50 the year before, down from 60+ ‘highlights only’ the year before. This steady decrease in reading numbers backs up my gut feeling that I slowly succeeded in replacing my reading time with writing time. (Here is a blog post I wrote about choosing to give up activities to have time for others.)
2011:
1. Write a new Nanlee story for Gracie.
2. Edit “Trash” and submit it to five markets.
3. Send the novel synopsis and outline for TGA somewhere, anywhere. Maybe Mary’s agent.
I never got TGA to Mary’s agent. I’m not sure I ever learned who Mary’s agent was. “Trash” was my fifth sold story, published in 2014. Nanlee is the main character of Trash, and I have yet to make a successful sequel. Still: points to past-me for genuinely quantifiable, achievable goals. And how ballsy was it I was planing on sequels before selling the piece?
2012 starts with a note that I didn’t meet any of my resolutions. I briefly consider just copy-pasting them, then decide that instead of New Year’s Resolutions, I’ll make a Monthly Mission each month, and my first Monthly Mission will be to write a new story with Nanlee.
(Year in Books was down to 25! But I did read War and Peace that year.)
Yeah, I didn’t do the monthly missions. I scanned the journal for the whole year and didn’t see any posts about them. Monthly Missions might have worked if I’d set up a process for them, reminders and the like. And again, as stated before, I never wrote a sequel to Nanlee’s story.
2013: No resolutions noted. I’d read 28 books the previous year and whine about how few it is, not noticing I’m up three from last year. The journal entries look like I was under a lot of stress: “Who am I to talk about having a ‘writing career’ anyway? I have a career in IT, and it’s the only career I will ever conceivably support myself at so I should just. shut. up.”
I sold one story and five poems in 2013. And I went to Clarion. This, combined, changed EVERYTHING. Despite my pessimism, I made a huge commitment to my writing. The sale came before Clarion. I’m not saying you have to go spend your life’s savings and quit your job to become a better writer. I’d succeeded without that… a little. But having a small success motivated further work, and spending every cent I had motivated not letting that be a wasted investment. Clarion left me HUNGRY, with a side order of “ticking clock.” After all, who would care if I put “Clarion graduate” in my cover letters more than two years after attending? New Clarion graduates were getting hatched every year!
Note at the beginning of 2014: “Resolutions: I didn’t make any. However, I did try to be more organized about my writing – success in the shape of an ongoing to-do list I keep in a notebook – and I wanted to keep sending things out – Rejectometer currently sits at 74. I have 15 stories ‘out’ in the mail right now. “
Keeping a constant writing to-do-list notebook is a big part of my writing practice. I’d been doing it a little before Clarion, but I did it every day at Clarion, and the habit stayed.
2014 Resolutions: Stop Freaking Out About Things and Track Poetry Submissions.
I did create a spreadsheet for poems and start tracking poem submissions, and I took a wellness class on mindfulness. I sold 4 stories and 2 poems in 2014.
2015 Resolution:
Get “spend one hour writing” to turn green in Habit RPG.
Habit RPG is a habit manager / electronic to-do list. You have ‘dailies’ and one of mine is “one hour writing” it’s currently red because I keep not doing it. If you do something regularly, it turns orange, then yellow, then finally “good girl” green.
WOW I forgot I did Habitica for a while! So sometime in 2014, I started using Habitica to remind myself to write for an hour every day. I recall I also had “submit something” as a daily or weekly habit. I didn’t stick with it, but I think it helped.
I’m going to end there. By 2016, I had the habits I have today. I write almost every day, keep 18-20 submissions out at a time, and I’m regularly selling short fiction.
One thing that has worked has been to get rid of the hard values. I mean I write ‘when I can’ not every day. And I write ‘as long as I can’ not for an hour. I don’t do wordcounts (in the days before LJ, I recall, I frequently set resolutions to ‘write a thousand words a day’.) These sorts of goals might work for others, but they didn’t work for me.
What really worked for me was having a system to keep myself accountable– my writing diary. When I get a free moment, I can look and see what I was hoping to get done next, and how long I’ve been procrastinating on a particular project.
The point of this blog post is: Well-meaning vows aren’t going to cut it. You need infrastructure. If that’s an online system like Google Calendar or a community like a writer’s workshop or what have you. Also: failing is a part of succeeding. I failed almost all of my resolutions, but I got back up and got going on them again. And the turning point was the year I didn’t make any resolutions at all.
I don’t know if this blog post will help anyone achieve a solid writing practice, but there is how I did it: I vowed, failed, vowed, failed, vowed, failed, tracked, succeeded.
