We here at the Kernel wish you a happy New Year and the start of a year filled with successes! Whether you intend to carry forward work from 2023 or you plan to start fresh, the new year is an opportunity to revisit your goals and the work it will take to achieve them. Read on to find out our New Year’s resolutions, and share yours in the comments so that we can cheer you on!
Shelby’s Resolutions:
Set realistic goals
I am a big supporter of setting low-stakes goals. As I’ve previously mentioned, my daily word count goal is 300, but I’m honestly happy the days where I write 50, too. By creating these achievable goal posts, I set myself up for success, signaling to my brain that I can accomplish what I set out to write, which encourages its continuation.
Maintain accountability
I would be significantly further behind on my novel draft if it weren’t for body doubling (shoutout to my fellow neurodivergent writers who understand!). If you’re not the type of writer who likes co-working with others, creating some sort of regular check-ins with your writerly buds is a must. Because I consistently write with others and talk about our goals and share our desires for our writerly lives, I believe in myself as a writer and feel the urgency and reality of this dream more so now than when I didn’t have this support system.
Go all in!
Last week, I caught up with a writer friend. We both had Other Life Things that we felt the pull to focus on. When we started chatting, we realized we didn’t want to work on the Other Life Things, rather we felt like we had to because if we didn’t, it meant that we were fully committing to our novels. “What if we spend the first quarter of the year focusing on our novels guilt-free?” my friend asked. That reframe felt doable, less indulgent. It’s only three months! I can do anything for three months! And if the Other Life Things call for me yet again, I can get back to them—knowing that I am in a place of greater confidence with my novel, my writing goals, and myself.
Natalia’s Resolutions
Consider past progress
Last year felt like a year of growth for me. I successfully finished writing a short story, which meant completing and grinding through several rounds of feedback. When people ask if I have a story to share, I can now say I do. It has done wonders for my sense of direction. Additionally, I got to a point in my novel where I felt confident in my voice. My husband said the novel excerpt that I used for my grad school apps was moving and felt like something only I could have written. This was something I didn’t even know I needed to hear and it has propelled me into the new year feeling hopeful and sure of who I am as a writer. For context, my husband is not free with his compliments or affirmations, so this was big.
Keep goals attainable
In 2024 I am going to start small with my daily intentions and build from there: 30 minutes of reading and 30 minutes of writing or active thinking on my novel. I’ve already surpassed these goals each day, but I won’t touch them until I’ve kept it up for at least a month. With a wider lens, my goal is to have a functioning draft of my novel by summer.
Writing is serious business and it takes real hours
A recent visit to a friend in Boston reminded me of what it looks like to live in accordance with one’s vocation. It’s not so much productivity as it is an awareness and a satisfaction that each hour of the day was spent meaningfully. There are often competing obligations and pressures for my time (real or imagined), and I hope to resist the temptation to squander my time or be overgenerous in my other responsibilities and joys by using a phrase my friend said that has stuck with me, “this is not my time to give.” This may seem like a dramatic and weirdly formal phrase but it has helped me internally prioritize what I’m meant to be spending my time on: writing.
Mind the distractions
Because of my flexible schedule, outside of my 20 weekly hours for a part-time copywriting gig, I often fall victim to phone calls and excessive travel. My husband has said in the past that talking to people is my real job. While I love people, I’m learning that even things you love, things that aren’t bad, can come at the cost of purpose. Now when I’m working, I slide my phone into “do not disturb,” and I’ve cut my travel down: only one weeklong trip between now and June. There are hours everyday that are not mine to give away to anyone or anything, and those hours I will spend reading and writing. And those hours I spend writing everyday are exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.
Neidy’s Resolutions
Maintain perspective
As I formulated my resolutions for 2024, I looked back at 2023—my goals, achievements, and challenges—and realized that I couldn’t just carry forward what I had done in the past. The first half of 2023 was marked by great successes in my writing life, but in the middle of the year, I had one of those life events that knocks everything off kilter. Writing has not been my focus since. I feel ready to let writing take center stage in my life again, and that begins with a reframe. My first goal for the new year is about perspective. While I have spent a lot of time grieving the loss of a particular season of my life (a necessary and healthy process), I will move through 2024 focusing on the space that loss created and knowing it is mine to fill.
Diversify readings
My reading goal for the year is 26 books. This is not a large number for me, in fact, it is about my average. Rather than increase the number of books I’m reading, I am focusing on choosing books across genres. Of the 26 books at least three will be poetry collections, two will be books of narrative nonfiction (both genres I sometimes completely skip in a year), and six will be collections of short stories. One thing I’ve discovered, as I’ve grown my network of critique partners, is that I learn the most when I consume writing unlike my own. To achieve my goal, I am holding myself accountable to at least twenty minutes of reading on at least five days of the week.
Build a repository
I would like to grow my collection of drafts this year, so I am aiming to write one new short story (longer than flash) each month even if it is incredibly rough. I plan on revising only works that I bring to workshops and critique groups and/or that I wrote before this year. Everything else will go into my repository for 2025 editing.
Get read
I plan to reach 100 submissions (including lit mags, contests, fellowships, conferences, etc.) this year. I am already at seven! Staying on target will require me to be consistent with the editing I have committed to (so that I have new things to submit) and to never wallow in my rejections.
Be gentle
My novel, which I had hoped to finish in 2023, returns as a 2024 goal. I will finish a draft this year. To achieve this, I intend to spend two days a week of my writing time dedicated solely to this project. This is incredibly reduced from the goals I set last year, but I recognize that at my peak, when I was writing thousands of words a day, was when the aforementioned life event occurred. I am giving myself the grace to process the story I was creating at that time and giving the story the space and moderation it needs to transform.
Sarah’s Resolutions
Recover a rhythm
My primary intention for 2024 is getting back into a steady rhythm with my writing. Starting an MFA program last fall, plus the unpredictable nature of family life, completely upended my long-time writing practice. Between October and December, I hadn’t even looked at my novel manuscript. So my immediate concern has been to make two hours of writing my first task of the day.
This has required setting some firmer boundaries, namely leaving my home—and leaving behind all of the responsibilities of motherhood and running a big and busy household—in order to work without interruption. Fortunately, my husband has been very supportive of this, and beginning next week my children will be back in school and daycare. In the near-term, I am hoping to eke out even more daily writing hours in the two weeks I have left before my spring school term starts—my own private writing-retreat, so to speak. This semester promises to be a doozy, with an even heavier course load than last, but I hope to head into it confident I’ve done all I can to ground myself in a sustainable writing practice.
Prioritize, prioritize
I’m the type of person who always thinks there are more hours than 24 in the day, who bites off more than she can chew, who believes every priority is a top priority. So an important aspect of my goal-setting for this year has included doing some forensic research into how much I am actually able to accomplish (based on previous years’ efforts) and not expecting I can accomplish more this year.
I discovered that, on average, I finish two short stories every six months, while working piecemeal on my novel. So that’s my goal for 2024: to finish four stories and a rough draft of my novel (I’m about 50,000 words in right now). With this in mind, I wrote out a list of all of the stories that have been tugging at me. Then I reread everything I had written on those stories before selecting the two (and only two) I most wanted to workshop and finish before summer break. The rest will just have to wait. That said, I will give myself complete freedom to free-write any idea that pops into my head, but I won’t expect to be able to do more with those ideas unless they supersede one of my other story goals. If everything is a priority then nothing is.
Find the fun
I’ve noticed lately that my writing really suffers when I write under the gun. So I’m trying to approach my two-hour writing block in a spirit of playfulness by beginning with writing whatever feels most appealing, rather than knuckling down to the scene I feel I need to write that day.
I’ve also noticed that I really struggle to see my accomplishments as the accomplishments they are, so a big priority for me will be to find ways to recognize smaller achievements: buying myself a new book when I meet my monthly word count goals, a night out with my husband when I finish a rough draft, and drinks with friends after I workshop a new story.
I’m also dreaming and scheming for lots of writing-adjacent fun in the coming year. I’m headed to my first AWP conference in February with none other than my fellow Kernalist Neidy (give us a shout out in the comments if you’ll also be there!). I’m applying to all of those coveted summer workshops and hoping this year will be the year I win that lottery—but I’m also not going to beat myself up if I don’t get in. The alternative is that I get to spend the summer just writing my novel (so win-win). Most of all, I’m looking forward to renewing my commitment to my writing workshops and the friends I’ve made there. They’ve brought such fellowship and inspiration to my writing so far, that I know that whatever I give to them will be returned to me many times over.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Shelby is a sucker for a good self-help book to start the year. She’s currently reading The Karma of Success by Liz Tran, which is helping her to visualize and manifest the cozy writerly life she so desires. She also read “The McDonald’s Boyfriend” by Tom Kelly, which tickled her speculative-loving bones by answering the question, what happens if your partner literally turns into a McDonald’s? Finally, Shelby welcomed TWO precious kittens into her home—and she couldn’t be more smitten.
Neidy hit the ground running this year. She has submitted stories to five magazines, one contest, and applied to one conference. She is also working on applications to one fellowship and four additional conferences. Currently, she is reading Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell and Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor.
Natalia submitted all her grad school applications (not just on-time but early) and read My Year of Rest and Relaxation while kicking off the New Year in Jamaica with her husband’s family.
Sarah enjoyed reading the last of the books she got for Christmas, including The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl and Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann. Her biggest inspiration this week came from reading Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, which she got from Neidy. In studying its beat sheets for how to craft a story arc that moves, Sarah was thrilled to discover that Brody’s blueprint overlays quite nicely with the plot of her own novel-in-progress. Most of all the book helped her see which areas of her story she needs to emphasize and expand upon and which chapters she probably doesn’t need to write at all.