At the beginning of October, I wrote a blog post about the way a recent episode of LaVar Burton Reads inspired me to reassess the role of ritual in my life. In this post, I modified the ritual of the confessional associated with the Jewish High Holidays to make it more meaningful for myself and my family. Instead of just listing all the things I was sorry for the previous year, I decided to take a more balanced approach and think about three things I was sorry for the previous year, three things that I did well which I would like to keep doing in the coming year, and three new ways I would aspire to improve myself going forward. I said I would return to this framework in January instead of making traditional new year’s resolutions. This post is my attempt to do so.
The idea behind the original post was that the confessional ritual was too negative. Making real change is more than just identifying what we did wrong. It also needs to acknowledge what we already to well, and what we could do better. The negative attitude of apologizing isn’t really conducive to real change. It needs to be balanced by a positive plan for making change.
New year’s resolutions suffer from the exact opposite problem. It is easy to set lofty goals, but all that positivity and motivation often fades when we do not acknowledge the factors which prevented us from being ourselves the previous year.
In both cases, the ritual lacks balance. Either positivity or negativity can be toxic when each is out of balance with the other.
It is also important to acknowledge what we are already doing well and to resolve to keep doing those things. In this season of change, it is easy to forget what we are already doing successfully, and to make sure we keep doing those things so that next year’s resolutions don’t end being the very things were were doing well in the past.
As such, modifying the ritual I described in the earlier post, I would suggest the following framework for a more meaningful self-assessment and plan for improvement in the following year:
- List three things you did well the previous year. These should be things which are healthy for yourself or for your practice (creative or otherwise) which you would like to keep doing or build upon in the coming year.
- List three weaknesses or behaviors which are detrimental to yourself and to your practice upon which you would like to improve in the coming year.
- List three resolutions/goals for the coming year. Remember that, as I’ve written previously, goals (as opposed to aspirations) should be things that you have control over. A target number of submissions is a good goal because you control how many you send out; a target number of acceptances is not a good goal because you do not control the decisions of editors.
While I don’t think it’s necessarily helpful for me to share my entire self assessment publicly, I will share one of my responses in each category as a model.
One thing I did well in the last year was to build on existing relationships. I submitted to markets which already published my work, and maintained relationships with editors and fellow writers with whom I worked previously. As an introvert, the social aspect of maintaining a writing career has been hard for in the past, so I made an conscious effort to maintain and build upon existing relationships. I was invited to submit work to four paying projects by editors with whom I previously worked; I received an edit on a novel manuscript from a professor whose class I had taken a few years ago; and I was invited to feature at a couple of local readings and events. Going forward, I must work to build upon those relationships and to guard against my tendency to let relationships lapse.
Looking back on the previous year, I noticed that I submitted to about 20 fewer calls than I did the previous year. Now, I had the same number acceptances, largely because of the relationships I developed, as mentioned above, but I didn’t hit my goal for submissions this year. I missed out on a number of opportunities to be published by missing deadlines for calls to which I had planned to submit, and, as such, I missed out on the chance to have more published work. A deeper analysis reveals that this was due largely to a lapse in short story submissions. I had a good year in poetry, a good year in comics, but I had fewer submissions for short prose, and therefore fewer sales and fewer acceptances. Part of this was due to writing my novel, which is one long prose piece as opposed to many shorter ones which could be submitted to different calls, but now that the novel is written, I want to focus on submitting to more short fiction markets this year.
Going forward I want to really examine which stories need to be comics and which can be written as prose. Often, I will have an idea which initially feels like a comic, but which could probably be modified slightly to be a short story. This is important because, while I love comics, the financial burden on the writer for an up and coming comics creator limits the amount of comics I can produce each year. I have notebooks full of ideas and pitches which remain unwritten because I can only afford to pay one artist at a time. Now, some stories have to be comics, but others, with a little work, can be developed into other mediums. This year, I aspire to be more critical of my ideas in this process, to write more of them as short fiction (dovetails with the resolution in the previous paragraph) unless they are ideas that truly work better in the comics format.
Hopefully this concept will allow you to self assess and improve in a meaningful way.
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A. A. Rubin 