Resilience and Persistence - A New Year’s perspective for writers

How tiny habits will help you make big changes

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope it brings you peace, productivity and another P of your choosing – publications maybe? Or prizes for your writing? Or maybe that thing we all need as writers and creatives – persistence.

I find New Year a time of contrasts. It’s a jolt of peppermint for the writing mind, a chance to wipe the slate clean and be upbeat and positive. But it feels like a time to be burrowing down and hibernating, not reaching up in some self-help orgy of improvement.   

I’m not alone in this. Reading other writers’ New Year posts on Substack this year, there’s been a bit of a backlash against the standard ‘resolutions and goals for the year’ fare. Resolutions are out, apparently, because they can simply set you up for failure when you don’t achieve them.   

I’m going to steer clear of that whole debate. I’m not going to talk about overarching goals or targets or how to make a Success Spreadsheet, or anything remotely in the ‘cleansing your writing chakras’ ilk.  

I want to share, instead, something I will be doing. About building resilience and persistence through tiny actions that become habits. For the sake of this piece, I’m going to define resilience as an immediate reaction, the bounce-back from a set-back. While persistence is the ability to stick with something long-term.

Look, I know in the New Year I am supposed to write something all ‘go-get-em-tiger’ and "‘New Year, New You’. But the idea I’m writing about addresses a simple truth. If you do anything this year in terms of writing, then you are going to have to be resilient, and you are going to have to persist in the face of adversity, much of which will be out of your control.  

This is not meant to be a negative post, but an affirming one. One that says I care. I care enough about my own writing to not just blithely step forward with expectation, but to face up to the truth that I will fail, and fail again, this year. That I am failing because I am trying. That failing is not the issue. Rejection is not the issue. Jealousy of others success is not the issue. The bin fire that is the publishing world is not the issue.

The issue is not about the set-backs that inevitably occur, but the response to those. And resilience and persistence aren’t things that simply happen on their own. We need to develop a way to ingrain them into our lives as writers. The way we do that is by persisting with small actions, small gains. To give up worrying about the big picture and concentrating on a single gain. Writing and creativity is a thousand piece jigsaw - you know what the picture on the box looks like, but you have to start by finding the corners first, then the pieces with the straight lines. Face the big by doing small. Very, very small.

One of the big books of recent years that looked at the topic of small habits making a larger impact is Atomic Habits by James Clear. There’s a lot in this book, not all of it applicable to writing, but there are some ways that it can help our practice, for example:

• Developing many good, small habits can make a big overall difference.
  As writers, particularly short fiction writers, we tend to concentrate on big defining moments in our stories. Quite often they are associated with the theme of resilience – the triumph over adversity narrative. That’s all well and good, because that’s drama. But in our own lives, something a little more mundane, but vital, is needed. Meaningful change and powering up our resilience and grit isn’t always about a big moment, but the accretion of many tiny actions and turning them into habits. It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. 

• Forget about setting big goals and targets. Focus on your process instead.
  Goals are about the results you want to achieve - to finish that collection or novel, or those short stories you have been working on for an age. The process is about all the little actions that get you towards that goal and deal with the knockbacks that come on the way. It is as much about changing bad habits as it is about developing good ones.

• Make connection a habit.
  I’ve said in one of my previous Substack posts  that though writing seems like a solo pursuit, an isolated one, it isn’t really. All writing is a joint effort that includes people who support you, people willing to read your stuff and the eventual reader themselves. So reaching out, not being afraid of being vulnerable in terms of sharing your writing, and accepting help, are key.

It’s important to recognise that you have the ability to do all of these things baked into your DNA as a writer. You know how to take lots of tiny elements - details of setting and characterisation, diction and syntax of characters, POV perspective - and mix them together to make a story, be it a flash fiction or a novel or anywhere in between. You know how to take those crucial elements of story making and making them a habit, because that is what good writing is all about.

Need some examples of these resilience and persistence building habits? Here’s five things that I am going to try:

1. Read one thing a day. Good or bad. A story or a poem. Seek out a recommendation and try it. But read proactively. Try to find out where and why something in that piece works, or doesn’t.

2. Reach out each day. Make the effort to connect with others. Tell someone about your writing. Post a comment here. Engage with the wider writer’s world.

3. On the days when you can’t summon the energy to write, or you have just had a knock-back, open a blank page and write a sentence of gratitude. Something positive. The act of doing that is a tiny building block of resilience. It is two fingers up at adversity. It means you wrote something that day.

4. When you need a shot of persistence but are feeling down, open the worst story, the most difficult passage of your novel, the thing that isn’t working, read it and add one thing that will improve it. Just a single word or sentence. There is no commitment to finishing it or editing it in full, just a single improvement that will mean you leave the story or scene in a better place than it was before.

5. When you are in the grip of procrastination, or your mind is whirl of external, personal difficulties, instead of trying to tackle writing and feeling defeated (then beating yourself up for NOT writing) simply open up a blank page and write down a reason why you write. Do that whenever you face this hurdle, so that you build a list, one item at a time, of affirmation for your own writing.

Don’t forget, this is not just about taking a positive action, it is about turning that action into a habit. Something reflexive. These habits in isolation may not appear to be much of anything, but each one cleaves to the other, each one that becomes ingrained builds your resilience and enables your persistence.

For your further delectation, I found some interesting insights on this topic via the Breakthrough and Blocks Substack – it’s well worth checking out: 

What does resilience mean?

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