Your 2025 Writing Resolutions
that actually make sense
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a reader-supported newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
News!
My debut novel Greenwich will be out July 22, and I no longer have to add “2025” to that because now it’s THIS YEAR! Adrienne Brodeur calls it “A stunning debut…Fast-paced, beautifully written, vividly peopled… impossible to put down.” Hit that preorder button!
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus
“Good Dead Girls,” is out in No Tokens
Hello all!
It’s the start of the new year and I have to assume that, like me, your inbox and your social media have been flooded with chatter about resolutions and transformation and changes and everything NEW NEW NEW. I don’t inherently hate the idea of taking a step back and evaluating what’s working and what could use some more attention in my life, and writing goals in particular are essential to helping me move through a project so that I have some kind of roadmap to completion instead of the nebulous blob of ??????????????????? that comes with writing a book.
But this is a time of year when I hear a lot of writers talking about their goals and resolutions for the next 12 months, and it made me realize I haven’t dedicated a January AAA post to this topic. I wanted my first post of the year to be about writing resolutions, and the difference between ones that are helpful and ones that are really, really not.
Writing resolutions come in two categories: things you can control and things you can’t.
In your control:
What you write.
Outside of your control:
What anyone thinks of your writing.
A resolution of any sort can aspire toward something out of your control, but you can’t make someone else do, um, basically anything. Including sign you or publish you or love your book or love you for writing it. (Sorry.)
As you think about where you are in your writing, and where you hope to be over the course of this year (and beyond), a lot of things are going to be out of your control. Goals like “This is the year I’m going to get an agent!” or “I’m going to get a book deal!” don’t make for good resolutions because the outcomes are completely out of your control. You have no say over how the agent or the editor or the acquisitions team is going to respond. Why make a resolution that’s completely out of your hands??? All you can ever do is write your best work, and then send it out. So that’s where your resolutions come in. How can you set yourself up to get that work done? What steps can you take to get your work in front of other people’s eyeballs so they’ll have chance to read it?
Think about what you’re going to do in order to put yourself in a position to have someone say yes to you. For example: “I’m going to finish revising my memoir and write a query letter” or “I’m going to send out 50 queries to agents” or “I’m going to send my new draft to my agent so we can go on submission before the summer” or “I’m going to start drafting a new book” or “I’m going to send out three short stories” or “I’m going to outline the next book in the series” or “I’m going to finish my proposal” or… you see where I’m going with this, right? These are all things you can do that are at least *somewhat* in your control. You never know what else might come up that will present a roadblock—I’ve written elsewhere about having different types of goals, and setting internal goals that also account for how hard you might be working at any given moment (what I call the rate of perceived exertion). But the starting point for all of this is what you yourself are going to write/create/submit/send.
If you do have a book out, or coming out (it me!!!!) the resolution landscape changes yet again, because I’ve done the writing, revising, editing, polishing… and now Greenwich really is fully and completely out of my hands, making its way to early readers (and eventually, in July, to everyone!) who are going to have their own responses and opinions and reactions. I can’t say “This is the year my book becomes a celebrity book club pick and an instant NYT bestseller and booktok’s new favorite release!!!!!” That would be ridiculous—and a surefire way to set myself up for disappointment. Anyone can see that I have zero control over those outcomes (and they’re all prettttttty unlikely)—just like I couldn’t control whether an agent would sign me, or an editor would want to work together, or an acquisions team would greenlight the project, or all the other pieces would fall into place. All I could do was write the book, revise the hell out of it, revise even more, get incredibly lucky, and do the work involved in transitioning from writing a book to publishing one. This year, my resolution is to be present and involved with my publicity team and, most importantly, to buckle down and get my next book in shape to submit.
Here’s another thought, though. What if instead of just shifting from external to internal goals—from what’s out of our hands to what we at least have some amount of say over—we also considered a different way of measuring what we want to do this year, and why we want to do it? What if our new years resolutions looked at how we want to feel over the course of the next twelve months, rather than how productive we’re going to be or how many pats on the back we hope to receive? “Be happy” isn’t much of a resolution, I know. And feelings aren’t something we can just control (alas). But if you think about why you write in the first place, maybe that can provide a path toward what you hope this year will bring.
I want you to feel good about what you’re writing. Even when it’s (sometimes) terrible and lonely and hard and it seems like there’s no way out of the mess of plot holes and structural problems and saggy middles and dragging backstories and unsatisfying resolutions. There’s still joy in it, don’t you think??????? There’s a reason we’re doing this in the first place. So in addition to the all external things you hope to accomplish (word counts, drafts, maybe agents and editors and readers, oh my!), I hope you’ll take a minute to make a resolution that’s for your happiness and well-being, and that maybe centers on the reasons you write, or want to write, or want get back into writing, or want to keep writing. I hope you’ll recognize your accomplishments and successes in doing that writing, even if they don’t come with shiny announcements you can post online, or that other people will even recognize as an achievement. You know you’re doing the work, and that’s what matters.
I’m thinking of everyone in California affected by these devastating fires, and hoping all of you and your loved ones are safe and well. Send me your questions for the new year, and keep writing!
Kate