Keep Your New Year’s Writing Resolutions
Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions as a Writer It’s January 1st, which means, if you are a writer, you probably just made a New Year’s resolution. It also means, if you’re a writer, last year you probably made a New Year’s resolution as well. And that probably means that you also fell short of whatever New Year’s resolution you made for yourself last year. And maybe even many years before… Which probably means that you’re already feeling a weird mixture of confidence and doubt, of hope and fear, of confusion and relentlessness. It means that you’re probably already excited to overcome whatever you feel like you missed out on doing last year, and also afraid that history might repeat itself. Keeping Your 2021 New Year’s resolutions is more about the way you approach goal setting towards your resolutions than it is about the resolutions themselves. So, on today’s podcast, what I actually want to talk about is goal setting. I want to talk about how to set goals, not to create the change overnight (which we all know doesn’t happen). But how to set goals that actually set you up for success, so that you can create the long term change that we are all looking for in our lives… This is so valuable, and not just as a screenwriter. This is valuable in literally any endeavor in your life that really matters to you. It’s valuable anytime you’re trying to do something hard that you can’t just do in one sitting, anytime you have a task you can’t just check off of your Asana or your reminder notification, anytime you’re doing something big that requires continuous effort. Often, these big things that require continuous effort, these superobjective kinds-of-things (to speak in screenwriting terms) are actually the things that matter most to us. Learning to set goals as a writer begins with learning to think a little more like your characters. One of the ways that we tend to be a little bit different from our characters– and not in a good way– is that our characters in a movie or TV show are really good at relentlessly pursuing these hard things. That’s what makes them so compelling as characters. It’s what makes us fall in love with them. They are going for something they want so badly that they’re making choices every day, every scene, to get them. Choices that are so big, that are so passionate, the kind of choices that we wish that we could make in our lives. And that’s the reason that when we watch and read these shows, these movies, these plays, these novels, we connect to those characters. Even when our characters are pursuing goals that we don’t approve of, or agree with, or even if they’re pursuing goals that are completely external from the realities of our lives, there’s a part of us that can’t help but root for those characters. We root for them because there’s a part of us that feels like “that’s me up there, or at least a part of me… the part of me I wish I could be… the part of me that wishes I could go for the things that I want with the kind of passion that these characters go for them.” The truth is, your characters are actually no different from you. They’re just distilled versions of you. Versions that are very good at intensely pursuing their goals. If you think about your lifetime, you’ve actually accomplished huge and incredible and challenging things. And the pursuit of those things, sometimes over years and years and years has changed who you are as a person and revealed who you really intend to be, not just to other people but also to yourself. The process of overcoming obstacles in pursuit of something that really matters to you doesn’t just reveal who you want to be on the outside, it actually reveals who you really are on the inside.