New Year’s Resolutions for Writers (2023 Edition)
The holiday cheer is peaking right now, and we at LivingWriter hope that everyone is having a blast with their vacation! After the year-long grind for your first drafts or final manuscripts or your month-long escapade with November’s NaNoWriMo, you deserve this break.
As the year comes to a close, we usually think of the new one that’s coming. What does 2023 have in store for you? What great things can you achieve for the next 12 months of your writing career?
To prepare for the next year, we have prepared 8 New Year’s resolutions for writers who are going into 2023 with hopes and promises of a better writing career.
2023 New Year’s Resolutions for Writers
Try a New Genre
You’ve spent 2022 wearing rose-colored glasses, writing the most beautiful romance between an artist and lawyer, or ex-convict and engineer, or singer and fan. Whichever pairing you thought up must have had everything work out for them (eventually). However, what if you switched gears for 2023?
You might be interested in exploring the idea of an artist becoming a lawyer, or an engineer/ex-convict clearing his name, or the real-life interactions of singers and their fans. Perhaps the third idea makes you shift from fiction to non-fiction entirely!
If you feel like you’ve emptied your baskets on your genre, maybe it’s time to shift into a new one. 2023 may be the year for you to see if you might also hit it big outside of your comfort zone.
Meet Other Authors
The writing community is a vibrant group of passionate writers, and you should be able to find patches of those people near you. Interacting with like-minded people is a great way to take a break from writing, or take inspiration from them.
Hang around local bookstores and other reading venues to meet people who share the same love for books and stories as you do, and share ideas about your next novel or simply socialize as people with common interests.
You will find experience and advice fresh from veterans in the field, or maybe you will get to impart your fair share of tips and tricks of the trade to a less-experienced bunch. Either arrangement benefits everyone at the end of the day, so make it one of your New Year’s resolutions to meet other writers like yourself.
Do Good Research
The common advice is to “write what you know,” and it’s a piece of perfectly harmless advice if you’re trying to will a story into existence. However, simply writing from memory and stock knowledge will not suffice for another year anymore. You have to improve upon your current well of knowledge and expand it.
Maybe you were able to wing your previous stories without much rigor, but research is a crucial part of the writing process. Even though you may be writing fiction, you cannot hope to write an internally consistent fictional world if you don’t inform your worldbuilding with accurate real-life knowledge.
Of course, the rigor required to do research may vary on your genre, but that’s not an excuse to skimp on it at all. Readers are vicious: they will know if you don’t do your research.
Read (Even More) Widely
‘Tis the age-old saying to read as much as you write. After all, how will you learn new things and understand new concepts if you don’t read? However, for 2023, you should one-up 2022.
If you read 10 books in 2022, make it 15 in 2023. If you read 15, make it 20. Better yet, read one for each of the 52 weeks of 2023. Nothing else in the world makes a better writer than reading religiously.
Of course, you also need to make sure that you are reading productively. Take notes of certain styles and plot developments that you can study to improve upon your own.
Understand that You Will Write Badly
Our minds are not machines that can readily spit out amazing stories and words every time we ask of them. Most especially during the first draft of your manuscript, your mind will definitely screw up many times you’ll almost always hate the first draft.
However, at this point of the writing process, the most important thing is to get the story down. You don’t need it to be perfect the first time around, and we say that it shouldn’t be, anyway. Trying to make it perfect on the first draft is grueling, if not torturous. So much time is wasted on editing the story before it’s even finished. You will end up hating your story before you write the last paragraph.
If you internalize this 2023 that you can only produce masterpieces by iterating on your manuscript over and over, you will end up with a healthier and more productive writing process that has a better chance of getting a manuscript done and ready to be published.
Celebrate Progress as Much as Results
Tangent to the New Year’s resolutions above, you might often value the opinions of your readers. Of course, that’s not an inherently bad metric to use as a basis for your performance as a writer. However, not all your books and stories will be appreciated by everyone.
Thinking about the readers is important, and it is part of the writing process. However, as a writer, you shouldn’t place their opinions on a pedestal. The most important part of writing is the fact that you are writing down a story that you want to tell. That, in and of itself, is worthy of celebration as much as what others think of your stories.
Write, Even When You Want To
Even if you are a pantser, a professional writer does not just write when inspiration strikes. As one of the most important New Year’s resolutions for 2023, you should write, especially when you don’t want to. Writing is still work, and words don’t manifest themselves in your draft if you don’t put in the effort.
You need to understand that good writing is not the first one that you put down to words, but the one that you worked hard to become good. So write, even when you want to.
Use LivingWriter to Make Your Life Easier
Of course, we at LivingWriter hope that one of your New Year’s resolutions would include you trying out LivingWriter for 2023. We offer quite a lot of features: we have Outlines and Chapters, Plot Boards, Story Elements, Research Boards, templates… You get the idea: we have it all here, and we’re still growing!
Coming from us, it might be a bit biased but LivingWriter is truly a living platform that’s perfect for writers. With our amazing array of features, we make sure that every writer who touches our platform has everything they’ll ever need and more. So that all you need to do is work and finish that manuscript.
Refill the Creative Well
As mentioned above, our inspiration will not always be there. However, you shouldn’t be like a sitting duck waiting for it to come back. Instead, you should also try to actively seek it out.
You can refill your creative well through a variety of ways, and most of them revolve around taking a break. Because, maybe, that’s what you also need. Resting is important, and it should be one of your New Year’s resolutions this year.
Spend the Next Year with LivingWriter
We hope that 2022 had been an amazing year for everyone. 12 months of writing stories, plotting character developments, and productively publishing novels for everyone to read. However, as life goes on, so do the years, and 2022 is now closing its curtains to open the doors and windows of opportunities for 2023.
Now that 2022 is well and gone, let’s welcome 2023 with the renewed vigor to write as many stories as we can, and write with more gusto than before!
Don’t forget to try LivingWriter this 2023, too!