New Year’s Resolutions For Writers That Actually Work

New Year’s Resolutions For Writers That Actually Work It’s New Year’s Day. That means, if you are like most people (and certainly if you’re like most writers), you probably just set a New Year’s Resolution for your writing.  The truth is, you probably set a New Year’s Resolution last year for your writing.  And you probably set a New Year’s Resolution the year before for your writing.  In fact, you’ve probably set a ton of New Year’s Resolutions for your writing.  Which raises the question: Why don’t New Year’s Resolutions work for writers?  If all the New Year’s Resolutions you’d set in the past were actually working, you wouldn’t need to set a new one every year. But the truth is, most people don’t keep their New Year’s Resolutions.  And I’m not just talking about artists. If you’re a writer struggling to keep your New Year’s Resolution, you’re in great company.  Everyone who’s trying to lose weight, go to the gym, eat a healthier diet, spend more time with their family, finally quit that job, finally do the things that matter to them– we all struggle to keep our New Year’s Resolutions.  What makes keeping New Year’s Resolutions for your writing so difficult?  To understand how to set New Year’s Resolutions you’re going to keep for your writing, we have to understand why New Year’s Resolutions generally don’t work in the first place.  To do that, we have to explode some of the general misconceptions of what it takes to build a life and a career as a screenwriter.  Blocked writers come to me all the time, and always say the same thing: “Jake, I need discipline! Help me get some discipline. How do I find some discipline? I just struggle with discipline.” And I always respond, “You are an artist. Of course, you struggle with discipline!” Everybody struggles with discipline. But artists by nature are rebels.  And what happens if you discipline a rebel? The rebel is going to rebel.  When you’re setting a New Year’s Resolution as a writer, you’re not just setting a New Year’s Resolution for the “adult” part of you.  The conscious, “adult,” part of your brain is what I call the “editing brain.”  It’s the super-smart adult part of you that knows, “I’ve got to set these very clear goals and then I’ve got to show up that these specific times. And if I just do this again and again, I’m going to get to where I want to go.”  You’re not just setting New Year’s Resolutions for that part of yourself.  You’re also setting New Year’s Resolutions for the child part of yourself, the subconscious mind, the actual writer inside you.  That childlike “writing brain” is not a polished adult with an agenda.  That part of you is a brilliant, intuitive artist, who in many ways is still a child. Who thinks like a child. And it’s your inner artist’s ability to speak like a child, to think like a child, to write like a child, to imagine like a child, to play like a child, that actually makes it a great writer!  That creative, childlike part, most likely, is a rebel. And if you punish a rebel, if you discipline a rebel, if you’re tough with a rebel, the rebel rebels.  If we want to be successful with our New Year’s Resolutions as writers, then we have to change our whole relationship with our conscious and our subconscious minds. In other words, if, instead of just beating ourselves up for not writing, we actually want to set New Year’s Resolutions that set us up to successfully write, we must find a balance between our writing brain and our editing brain, the part of us that has an agenda, and the part of us that just wants to play.