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I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions for two reasons, both of them (as is my way) directly relating to story.

First: In the idealistic focus on what we want for our future, we often neglect to first consider the past. We’re setting goals we resolve to move toward without considering the backstory—where we are, how we got here, and why.

In story that leads to underbaked stories and characters who may spin their wheels without ever really going anywhere, and lose steam and their way along the journey. In planning for our careers it does the same, often leaving us stuck, aimless or lost, or derailed on meaningless detours.

Second: Too many “resolutions” tend to be vague or unclear: “lose weight” or “exercise more,” for instance—or in writing it may be things like “finish a manuscript” or “publish a book.”

In story, fuzzy, ill-defined goals can compromise reader investment, stall momentum, and lower stakes—just as in our careers they can compromise our focus, stall out our progress, and siphon away our motivation and drive.

Regular readers—and those who’ve read my latest book, The Intuitive Author—know that I advise that creating the kind of fulfilling writing career you can satisfyingly sustain for a lifetime requires deliberate, conscious consideration and planning—and part of that is regular reassessment of where you are and where you want to go.

The New Year is as good a time as any for a checkup and diagnostic of your creative career—it’s when I conduct my own every year, and assess where my business currently stands and where I might want to take it going forward. Doing so will help you form a clear picture of your values, goals, and actions in pursuing your own creative career.

But to create meaningful, actionable plans for our careers, we have to consider both of the above aspects of successful “resolutions”: past/present and future.

In this first installment of a two-part blog series, let’s start by addressing the first point and look back at the past year and where our careers may be right now. This post is a bit meaty, but we want to do a thorough inventory of where we are so we can set achievable, meaningful goals for where we want to go.

What Have You Done for You Lately?

The first thing I like to do is look at what I’ve accomplished professionally in the last year, and what was meaningful and rewarding to me. It’s easy to forget, overlook, or downplay our achievements and triumphs, so starting from that foundation sets the right tone for taking an analytical but constructive look at where we want to go. (If you need reminding as you make your own list, look back at your social media posts or your calendar.)

In 2024 I…

• wrote, edited, and released my second book for writers, The Intuitive Author (an Amazon bestseller in several categories almost immediately)
• wrote nearly 70 blog posts, articles, and other posts
• created 7 new courses for writers
• presented/taught 23 in-person or online classes
• worked directly with more than 40 authors in an editorial capacity, and hundreds of others through teaching, speaking, and consulting engagements

As you assess this list, first take a moment to appreciate what you accomplished in your career in 2024. Even if your list includes only increasing the word count of your WIP—by any amount—or taking a helpful craft class, or attending a conference, etc., give yourself credit for doing anything at all—no matter how small—to move closer to your goals. And if you didn’t move as close or as quickly as you’d like, that’s going to help you make a clearer, better plan for 2025.

But another key thing making this list accomplishes is helping correlate the actions you took with the results you got—and I don’t just mean concrete results. Looking at my list, I accomplished a lot, but if we’re going to create a career that feels meaningful to us on a day-to-day level—which is the most important aspect of a rewarding writing career, and the only part under our control—then we have to know how well what we are doing yields what we want: not just our concrete goals, but the deeper, intangible goals we expect those tangible ones to help us attain.

While I achieved most of the concrete goals I set for myself this year, the net result was that for much of the year I felt stressed, stretched thin, and by the end of the year not a little bit burned out.

I love this work and I want to continue doing it, so going forward I have to find a different approach that allows me to take from it what nourishes me, which is a feeling of enjoyment and inspiration and the creative and scheduling freedom to dedicate my time to activities that offer me that. That will help me as I start planning what I want for next year.

What is it that you actually want from the goals you may have articulated for yourself? Dig deeper than the external “milepost” goal, like publication: What do you imagine or anticipate that achieving that particular goal will offer you that you value—credibility? money (hahaha!)? acclaim? a foot in the door of the publishing industry? a wider readership or platform? Some combination of these, or something else?

And why do those things matter to you? Much as I advise doing in developing your characters fully, you want to dig deep into what drives you as an author, down at the core. That’s the source and the sustenance of a career that will deeply fulfill you and be sustainable for the long run.

So now we need to analyze this list a little bit more closely. Between writing The Intuitive Author and the amount of editing work and course creation I also took on this year it was too much—that workload cost me time with my family and friends, time for other pursuits, and a lot of mental and emotional stress.

I know that I want more of the first two and less of the third, so this tells me I need to relax my schedule a bit going forward, and reexamine my goals.

Reevaluate Your Future Priorities Based on Your Past

To lay the foundation for a concrete plan for the future, I examine each element on the list for this past year for what it required of me and what it delivered, and how well that fits my overall desires for my career on a day-to-day level.

Book writing

Writing and releasing The Intuitive Author was one of my biggest resource sucks this year (meaning my time and energy), but it was important to me for a variety of reasons to get this particular book out this year. However, even though I know I still want to continue writing books and have several more outlined, it’s not the main focus or fulfillment I get from my career, and realistically speaking the money it generates is not as significant to my overall income as other activities.

Those two factors together mean I can move it down my priority list—a literal written list I keep and reexamine each year to determine where I want to allot my time and energy going forward.

Other writing

Looking at the number of blog posts and other articles I wrote, that was also a heavy lift, but between the income some of that writing generates and the other intangible benefits, like the immediate reward and pleasure of writing this blog, the opportunity these posts and articles give me to connect directly with authors, the visibility, and the exploration of ideas that then serve my other pursuits, like course creation, this is in fact worth the amount of time it takes to me, so it moves up on the priority list.

Course creation/teaching/presenting/speaking

Besides editing, without doubt the most time- and energy-consuming activity I undertook this past year was course creation. I authored seven new courses, which is an extremely heavy lift for me.

Creating a course requires much more than simply putting together a deck. It takes weeks and often months of thinking through ideas, formulating structure and how I want to present them, and then doing extensive reading to find useful and relevant examples of the concepts. Trying to do all of that so many times over, amid writing and releasing a book and maintaining my usual editing schedule, is a great deal of what stretched me too thin this past year. 

That said, I still find this work to be extremely rewarding—not just the creation of these courses but teaching, presenting, and speaking in general. I did much more of that this year than in past years as well, but I’d like to continue to dedicate resources to those pursuits. They help serve my central mission statement—another aspect of creating a business plan for your career that I recommend actually writing down and revisiting every year. You’ll find mine on my website’s bio page: To empower authors to take ownership of their own careers by honing their knowledge, skills, and experience in the craft and business of writing.

I also find teaching courses and workshops enjoyable, inspiring, and energizing, and I like how they keep me connected to the writer community. I like having the opportunity to travel to meet people in person and explore writers’ conferences to expand my own skills and writing community, as well as having opportunities to travel that I can springboard off of to visit friends, explore areas I want to see, or just take time away with my husband.

That means presenting and speaking stays on the priority list, but I am setting some parameters and limits on how much of this type of work I’ll take on, to make sure it doesn’t pull away from other goals next year or make me feel as overcommitted as I did this year.

I’ll also focus more on updating and deepening the existing courses I already have—which is more than a dozen, a solid stable of offerings—rather than creating new courses. I’ve committed to creating only three new courses this year. That lets me maintain the elements of this prong of my business that I love, while not letting it encroach on the time and energy I have for other prongs.

Editing

Finally, I need to take a look at the editing work itself. This is and has historically been the main focus of my career and the primary source of my income, but part of reexamining every aspect of my mission statement and business plan each year is allowing myself to ask whether it’s still what I want to be dedicating the bulk of my time to.

We’ll look more at that in the next part of this series, but for now I want to cast it in a historical light as I examine my “backstory.” In The Intuitive Author I recommend regularly asking yourself a question I have always used to evaluate how much I’m enjoying what I’m doing: If someone told you that where you are in your career right now was the most you would ever achieve, would you still be happy doing it?

That can be a scary question, particularly with something that is not only our passion, but a big part of our identity. But it’s one I think it’s essential for us to ask regularly, because if we don’t look clearly at how we’re spending our time and what we get out of it, it’s easy to find ourselves in dead ends, or burned out, or losing our fire.

Usually with editing my answer is an easy, hearty yes—but this year the question had a more complex answer.

I’ll be honest: There was a brief period of time toward the end of this year where I started to consider whether I still found editing as rewarding as I used to. Regular readers may know that I used to be an actor, and this question was the one that led to my realizing that I no longer wanted to pursue that career. I started to fear that I was reaching that point as an editor, that despite how unthinkable it may have seemed for a career that has been my passion for decades, I wondered if I had if it had run its course for me.

When I quit acting I felt unmoored afterward, because it was so much of who I thought I was and what I always thought I would do. But I also felt an immediate sense of lightness and joy and possibility when I allowed myself to consider giving it up.

But when I gave myself the same consideration with editing, I got a heavy pit in my stomach, and a powerful feeling of sorrow. That was important, because it told me that as exhausted as I may have let myself get this year, it didn’t mean I was ready to hang up my red pencil. It just means I need to reevaluate how I’m approaching what I do so that it fits my priorities, my passions, and the day-to-day existence I want to have in my career.

So what does this process look like for you as an author?

• Allow yourself to first look at whatever WIP you’re in the middle of. Do you still feel the same strong urge to tell this story that made you begin it? Even if you’re stalled out, floundering, or stuck, at the heart of this story, the central story question, does it still motivate and intrigue you? Do you still want to explore this plot, these characters, these themes? Does it still feel meaningful to you?

If at the core you can say yes, then even if you’re struggling, that’s an indication that it will be worth working through even the thorniest story development. But without that, all the editing and revision and craft development in the world isn’t going to help you create a truly rewarding story.

Read more: “What Story Are You Telling and Why?”

• Then widen the lens and take a look at your other motivations, pursuits, and goals in 2024. How did you spend your writing time? Was it productive, satisfying? Did you feel you were able to set aside enough of it? I’m a big fan of quantifying most everything, so if you didn’t note how much time you actually spent writing this past year, see if you can realistically estimate it—and start logging it for 2025 so you have a frame of reference for next year. What else did you do for your craft and career—and how effective and rewarding was it?
• How about other aspects of your career and how you spent your time in pursuit of them? Editing, revising, marketing, social media, research—did the time you devoted to these areas “pay off” in terms of the results you wanted, the satisfaction you took from them, what they cost you in time, energy, and money against what they offered you and your career?
• Finally, take time to consider the path you’re on in general with your writing career. For instance, if you have been focused on getting an agent and traditionally publishing, is that still something you want to do? Why—what do you feel it will offer you that will lead to more daily fulfillment in your career and move you toward the long-term goals that are important to you? Are there other ways toward some of those goals that might be more immediately rewarding to you for what you want from your writing career? Consider all the options and alternatives—including ones you may have dismissed out of hand—so you have a solid foundation toward planning your career in the year to come, which we’ll focus on next week.

Consider Your Career in the Context of Your Life

Finally, because we are all so much more than our careers and our writing, we need to consider our career as part of the larger framework of the rest of our lives.

In his autobiography, actor Martin Short says that the secret to fulfillment in life for him lies in thinking of the various areas of his life that matter most to him as individual courses in an overall curriculum, so that even if he’s struggling or “failing” in one area—say, career or hobbies, etc.—his overall GPA stays strong by remembering that it’s a cumulative product of all the “courses.” What would the individual “courses” in your personal life curriculum be?

I think of my own overall satisfaction and well-being similarly, but a little differently. In both the personal and professional arenas, I consider several areas:

• mental  
• emotional  
• physical  

Personally I had some positives and negatives in each area. It was a solid year physically—I sustained and even improved on my health and fitness.

I had some definite wins mentally and emotionally too—I was able to attain a measure of objectivity and in general fulfill my goal of responding to difficult situations and circumstances rather than reacting to them.

But I also had some struggles. I already talked about the mental and emotional toll for me professionally this past year—that’s going to factor heavily into my planning for next year. I also suffered in not having the time I wanted to spend with my husband and other loved ones, in feeling overwhelmed, in lacking downtime for my own pursuits, etc. Those things will also factor into my planning for the future.

Considering where you’ve been and where you are in this kind of depth and detail is an essential foundation for the first part of setting achievable “resolutions” for yourself and your career: understanding your “backstory.”

In assessing this past year as a whole, how effectively did your pursuits meet your goals? I had a career-best year financially and hit a personal milestone in that area, but work consumed much more of my time, mental energy, and my emotional life than I wanted it to, and this isn’t a pace I want to or feel I can sustain.

Considering where you’ve been and where you are in this kind of depth and detail is an essential foundation for the first part of setting achievable “resolutions” for yourself and your career: understanding your “backstory.”

Next week in part two we’ll dig into the second part: setting clear, defined goals, both tangible and intangible, that will fulfill our desires and our values and set us up for a happier, more successful writing career…and life.

Find part two of this series here: "How to Succeed as a Writer: Make a Concrete Plan"

Over to you, authors. Do you know what drives you—and do you have a clear mission statement for your career? How do you prioritize where you dedicate your time, energy, and other resources? How demanding/rewarding were the things you pursued and accomplished in 2024—and what does that ratio suggest about how you might want to make some changes or lay the groundwork for 2025?

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