5 Steps To Keep Your New Year’s Writing Resolutions

5 Simple Steps To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions as a Writer It’s January 1, which means it’s time to talk about how to keep your New Year's resolutions as a writer. New Year's resolutions are one of the places where writers most often go wrong. We set these huge goals for ourselves, and just like everybody setting New Year's resolutions, we usually fail to keep them..  We believe the reason we're not keeping these New Year's resolutions, the reason that we're procrastinating, the reason why we're falling into the same patterns again and again… we believe it's a lack of willpower. We believe we're lazy. We believe maybe we just don't want it enough. We believe maybe there's something wrong with us. We believe that maybe we're just too scared.  We have all these stories for ourselves about why we're not changing. But really, most of the time, the reason that we're falling short of our New Year's resolutions, whether it's as a writer, or for any other resolution, is because we've set ourselves up to fail in the way that we've made the resolution in the first place. So we're going to talk today about 5 simple steps you can take to make resolutions that actually work, that will actually work for you, as a writer.  Step #1 For New Year’s Writing Resolutions That Work: Focus On The Small Steps, Not The Destination.  If you actually want to change your life, and you want those changes to last, the most effective way you can do that is often by making small changes frequently. It is much harder to make a huge change overnight than it is to take a small step overnight.  To be clear, I’m not saying that people can't make huge changes overnight. People do and can, but it's usually not the most effective way to get there.  For an example, think about your characters in a script. If you've taken my Write Your Screenplay class, if you’ve studied Seven Act Structure, you understand the concept that a movie is just a story of a character who changes. And that as we build that change, we need many steps to get the character there. And one of the big problems with the old three-act structure is that getting a character from A to Z in three steps is not very likely.  It's not that sometimes people don't just change like that. But most people don't.  When most people try to change forever in a moment, what they actually end up doing is just proving to themselves that they can't change.  And, inadvertently,. they end up reinforcing the very beliefs that get in the way of the change, and that get in the way of their goals.   We know this as screenwriters. We know that if your character is at A and then in the next scene suddenly they’re at Z, that’s not believable. We get feedback like: I didn't feel the structure of this. I didn't believe the change. I didn't believe that the change would stick.   When we build Seven Act Structure: when we build a movie, a limited series, a pilot– we're actually figuring out the movements by which a character can believably and lastingly change. So the first mistake in making New Year’s Resolutions as writers is that we tend to think only about the endpoint, rather than thinking about the movements we will need to get there.  And it's exactly the same problem that most screenwriters make with structure. They think, Oh,