If making New Year’s resolutions is cliché, surely it’s also become a cliché to declare that resolutions are silly. “95% of resolutions fail by January 7!”¹ we might say, smugly. “Glad I never want to get better at anything!”

Except, of course, most of us do want to get better at something. Maybe you want to be able to do the crossword puzzle in pen. Maybe you’d like to learn all the words to Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolls Me)² and knock their socks off at karaoke night. Maybe you have a writing goal you’d like to meet, like “finish 4 short stories”. The answer to all this, of course, is the same as the answer to the essay title: Practice.

In my view, this is one reason why resolutions fail. Usually we set out trying to use our resolutions to get to achievements. But if what we want is to get incrementally better at something, the achievements are almost beside the point. The point is the doing, practicing every day.

For instance, sometimes in weightlifting I get a personal best. My personal best is nowhere near the weight that it would take to impress anybody who knows anything about weightlifting. That’s not what’s important. My goal for weightlifting is not to achieve a 100lb clean and jerk.³ My goal is to get stronger. If I diligently pursue getting stronger I may very well also experience doing a 100lb clean and jerk, but that’s incidental to the daily win of getting stronger, even if I only increase the weight on my bar by a couple of pounds per session. Weightlifting is a practice.

Let’s consider, then, some writing practices that might be useful to us in the new year.

1. Do the work, don’t judge the work.

Some of you are already mad at me. I’m not suggesting that you show anyone work that you feel isn’t up to your standards. I’m just saying that you may have to write work that isn’t up to your standards before you can get it perfect. Nothing ever springs from your brain fully formed, it’s just that Composing You and Editing You are in different balance on different days. When you are writing, especially in first draft, make Editing You take a coffee break.

• Do the work your way, not somebody else’s way.

I have a buddy who writes very, very clean first drafts. He says he sees the story like a movie in his head, and writing feels like cutting a film. The tradeoff is that his first drafts tend to take a long time to write. I have another buddy who can’t outline a story without killing it—figuring out what happens is the gasoline that lets her drive forward in the writing. They’re both doing what works for them, and both of them have tried unsuccessfully to force their writing process to look like something you’d see in a how-to-write book.

The people who got mad at point one are now chomping at the bit to ask “Well, what if editing as I go IS my process, huh? Huh? What then?” To that I say, pay attention to yourself. Probably what is actually happening is something like this: you write a sentence or paragraph. You pause. You reread it. You fix it a bit. You read it again. You fix it again. You move on and write the next sentence or paragraph.

What you see there is Editing You and Writing You playing ping-pong. What you don’t see is something like: write a sentence. Delete it, because it stinks. Write a sentence. This one also stinks. Delete it. Call yourself names. Write the first sentence again. No, it still stinks.

That is Editing You and Writing You both trying to grab the wheel at once. It’s impossible to drive while that’s happening. That’s what we mean by judging the work. Honor your process—iterate as many times as you want. But don’t decide the work isn’t worth doing.

• Don’t kick the dog.

To practice the piano, you have to sit down at the piano. No amount of reading about pianos or listening to concerts will forge the connections between your brain, fingers, and emotions. You have to actually touch the keys for that. Likewise, no amount of knowledge about writing will actually get words written. You have to show up to the page.

This is the part of a writing practice that gets very tricky, because people—especially modern, educated people—tend to be very harsh with ourselves about this. We are a production-oriented society, so it’s very tempting to try to use a stick to drive ourselves forward. That is a bad method for a continuing lifelong practice, though, buddies, and it’s not how brains work. ⁴

Punishment is how you get a brain to avoid doing something. If you show up to the page and you spend most of the time there yelling at yourself, is it any wonder that you don’t want to write?

So when you show up to do the work this year, show up with kindness toward yourself, as if you’re training a good dog. You wouldn’t kick the dog to teach it to sit. Don’t berate yourself to get yourself to write. Don’t kick the dog.

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There are going to be days when we are sick, or exhausted, or have too many other things happening in life—good things, sometimes!—and those will be days when we don’t write much or even at all. There are going to be days when we sit down and the words pour out like a river of fire. Most days will be in between. There will be some inertia as we sit down and we don’t want to write. The words will feel like sawdust, and the whole thing will feel like an exercise in futility. (I want to gently encourage you that “Don’t Delete The Sawdust” is a discipline to embrace. Delete the sawdust tomorrow if you still don’t like it then. Often you’ll be surprised to find out you don’t hate it anymore.) For now, just praise your brain/dog—you’re just training yourself to show up.

Do the work. Do it most days, the way you drink your coffee. Do it when you feel silly. Do it with the same kindness toward yourself that you’d have toward a good dog. Do it with detachment, if you have to, and watch the story develop as if it was written by someone else. But practice. Do the work.

I’ll meet you at Carnegie Hall.

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1. I made this statistic up. ↩︎
2. Incorrect: you actually want to learn all the words to We Didn’t Start The Fire. ↩︎
3. Although I *did* get a 100lb clean and jerk, almost accidentally. Thanks, Coach Leslie. ↩︎
4. Brains are just trying to keep you alive in what, last they were informed, is a wilderness full of hippos. If you show them the writing chair is hippo-water, they just won’t go in there. Brains are no dummies. ↩︎