Here’s Your New Year’s Writing Resolution
In 2025 and beyond, keep telling yourself that yes, you really deserve to write. Because you do.
Writing and Writers: What I Once Believed
I believed that I didn’t deserve to write.
This was back in the late 1980s and into and beyond the `90s when a voice inside me said that, as a new immigrant in America, a day-job worker, the child of working class parents, who the heck was I to take time out for writing?
Writing was for the well off. The leisured. The erudite. For those who had once been told, ‘Yes, you can.’ Yes, I believed all these.
Also, I believed that writing was a clandestine act and a frivolous luxury—something for those of us who didn’t lie awake at night worrying about the mortgage or the credit cards.
Later, after I had published some short stories and creative nonfiction essays and my first books, I held on tight to my “not-for-you” imposter syndrome.
No more.
January 2025: What I Believe Now (3 Things)
Ask our ancestors. We are all wired for storytelling, for words, for narrative, for song, for poetry. So let’s do what they’re telling us to do. Or let’s do what they were prevented or silenced from doing. Don’t wait for some stranger or teacher or professor to give you permission to write.
As well as being a creative act, over 300 clinical studies show that writing makes us feel better. Writing is a self-care tool that allows us to show up at our non-writing places (work, family, health issues) as our better or best selves.
Most important: As a busy day-job worker or a family caregiver or both, writing is something that we deserve to do. For us. And, by extension, for the other people in our lives.
New Year’s Writers Resolutions: Believe. Begin. Persist.
This January, make yourself a New Year’s resolution or promise to write for 15 minutes, three times per week. Start small. Build your habit. Find the time slot, the place or setting that works best for you.
Find some of the many online and in-person resources, writing prompts and workshops to get and keep you writing.
Most important: In 2025 and beyond, keep telling yourself that yes, you really deserve to write.