Concerning new year’s resolutions
New Year’s is my favorite holiday. I love goals and lists and spreadsheets and numbers, and I love seeing what I can do if I keep practicing. Every year, I set 3–5 resolutions, and usually at least one of them is related to writing.
This year, that one went well.
The best resolutions are typed furiously into one’s phone notes while avoiding sleep.
This looks like an outcome-based goal—and not even a particularly measurable one—but there’s a process goal embedded within it. I knew this goal would require writing more than one story. I also knew that, to find out whether my stories were anything like “excellent,” I would have to subject them to the scrutiny of people who judge such things.
2024, by the numbers:
New stories completed: 24
Submissions to contests and magazines: 112
Rejections (so far): 59
In pursuit of my resolution, I wrote, and I learned, and I put myself out there, and I received a great deal of polite rejection notes. Like many short story writers, I track and celebrate rejections, but every single one of them does sting.
But . . . I also won two short story contests with substantial prizes: NYC Midnight and Writing Battle. I’m proud of these successes. I love fiction, and I’ve been writing fiction all my life, and I’ve never received public acknowledgement for it before.
So why now?
It was in no way obvious to me why I had this result. Why this year, after a couple decades of writing? Why those two particular stories, when so many others got tossed directly in the round file?
My favorite story that I wrote this year still sits unpublished on my hard drive, having been sent off to twelve contests or magazines and counting, with its greatest accomplishment being an oh-so-slightly personalized rejection note from Apex Magazine.
I will be living off those nine extra words after “Unfortunately” for the foreseeable future.
The people who judge contests and run magazines like some of my words (which is wonderful), but they don’t like most of them. Not even the ones I think are best. Worst of all, I don’t know why, which means I don’t know why I succeeded at my resolution.
More facts and figures:
Total words written, across all projects: 285,065
Average words per day: 781
I think that’s a lot of words? Some of my writer friends tell me that is a lot of words. Still, it’s fewer than I wrote while focusing on novels in 2023 (748k) or in 2022 (records fuzzy, but similar to ’23).
So. The stats say that the people who judge contests and run magazines like a very tiny minority of my words. The “why” of my successful resolution is still uncertain, but the “how” is starting to look a little clearer.
For me, it’s a numbers game.
I need to write a whole lot of words to eke out a few good ones.
This isn’t true for everyone. I’m privileged to know a few exceptional, award-winning authors who call themselves “under-writers,” who draft lean and then painstakingly fill out their stories in editing.
Could never be me.
Personally, I achieve concision only after backspacing through enormous swathes of hard work. I have never known how to just do it slowly and correctly the first time. Maybe you do! Maybe you’re an under-writer, and the reflection I’m doing here will not benefit you at all. Please take note of the law of equal and opposite advice, and listen to or ignore me accordingly.
What’s next?
I haven’t made a specific plan for my writing in 2025 yet. I’m waiting to see if I get into a few different programs:
Still, I feel confident that regardless of whether these particular paths work out for me, my high-level goal is clear. When a strategy works, you should seriously consider simply doing it more. So . . .
In 2025, I intend to write more words and show them to more people.
What will you do this year?
