Writer’s Resolution 2025: Change Your Story

The author makes a story. But a story also makes the author.

What I mean is this: I think as writers, as authors, as storytellers and artists, we build ourselves along the way out of the narrative spare parts we find on the journey of growing up. We collect them unconsciously, a crow snatching up buttons and coins, and we edit them into our own personal narratives. Some of this is obviously good and necessary; as we figure out who we are as a person, we also figure out who we are as writers. We figure out what we like, what we don’t, what challenges us, what drives us, and those becomes part of our tale. But sometimes, it presents a problem. We pick up unnecessary expectations, we gather jealousies to our chests, we clutch close many falsehoods disguised as truths, and we fuse them brutally to our idea of who we are as storytellers in this world — branches from someone else’s tree that we graft to our own.

Sometimes instead of finding our own motivations, we are handed motivations and accept them.

Sometimes, we accept the negative thoughts and problematic outcomes told to us, and they become so much a part of our story we think we told them first instead of having inadvertently copied them into our narrative.

Sometimes, the ever-shifting industry leaves us feeling rattled and false-footed and makes us doubt who we are, why we’re here, and if we can even tell the stories we once set out to tell.

We hear that we have to write this kind of story, not the one we want to write; we see that oh this writer is doing better than us so we have to change ourselves to be more like them; we make permanent decisions based on temporary conditions.

(And here I am reminded that recently I read an article about how the Broccolis, the family in charge of the creative side of the James Bond franchise, are keeping Amazon — who now own Bond! — at arm’s length because they don’t like how Amazon calls Bond “content.” And in that article there was a great quote from Barbara Broccoli when she recounts advice from her father: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”)

Put differently, I know a lot of writers across the spectrum of experience — from neonates to published authors to bestselling ones — who are really going through it right now. They’re questioning their place in the grand spectrum of things — trying to see themselves and where they belong in the world of both authors and their stories. And to some degree, this is good! We’re supposed to gaze inward. We need to evaluate and reevaluate that about ourselves and the tales we tell. It is perhaps essential to keeping dynamic, to being active in our own upkeep and not just settling into a rut.

At the same time, it can be hard because that reevaluation can leave us wanting — it can make us feel lesser than we are, or not up to speed, or simply undeserving of a path forward. This forms a rut all its own.

I’ve noted in my book (sorry to plug, but Gentle Writing Advice is out there for you if you choose to find it) that self-doubt isn’t always a bad thing. Doubt can open a door to a better place — it can tell us, okay, the doubt is instinctive, something is off, it’s urging me to through the door to somewhere I need to go. But it can also hamstring us. It can poison us. It can be a lie, doubt born of falsehood, doubt with teeth, doubt serving only to halt our momentum through that door instead of pushing and prodding us forward.

New writers can feel like they’re never going to get there. Midlist writers can feel like they’re never going to break out. Veteran writers can feel like they’ll never do anything new. You worry you’re writing the wrong genre, the wrong way, the wrong this, the wrong that. The story we tell about ourselves darkens, suddenly turbid with this pollution of uncertainty and self-doubt, and so I think for me, maybe for you, 2025 can be a year where you change that story. Because we are authors of it. It doesn’t author us. We have the power of narrative and the power of editing that story.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can magically change conditions on the ground — you can still only control what you control, but what you control is the story in front of you and why you bring yourself to tell it. It’s that last part that maybe matters most, here. The story you tell can be less about the weight of expectation and certainly less about all the external valuations — but rather, the story you edit and rewrite and tell anew can be one about how, no matter what anybody else thinks, no matter what the conditions of the industry are, no matter what poison has been dripped into your ear —

You’re still a writer, and the writer writes.

Is this oversimplistic? Sure. Does it pave over doubt? It shouldn’t — like I said, some doubt is good. Some doubt is clarifying. A knife at your back pushing you forward, forward, ever forward. But you can relearn why you do the thing you do. You can tell the story that you’re a person who finishes what you begin, who tells the story they want to tell, who cares about the craft rather than the industry, who is good to themselves rather than cruel. You can change those parameters of your story. You are author and editor.

So, for me, and maybe for you, that’s my way forward in 2025 — just making sure that the story I tell about myself as a writer is the one I want to be telling, not the one I’ve just unconsciously and unwittingly accepted. It’s about a surefootedness and confidence in myself, and less about the outcome others control and more about the outcome I can command.

Don’t like the story you have about yourself as a writer?

Tell a simpler story. A kinder story. And most of all, a better story.

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I should note here I was going to do a RAH RAH RAH FUCK ‘EM 2025 IS GONNA BE A KICK TO THE DICK SO KICK IT IN THE DICK INSTEAD kind of a post, but that just feels like — well, you’ve heard it before. You know it already. We’ve been there on and off for the last eight years. It’s gonna get bad and weird and we will have to meet it on the battlefield, and we can use our work as opposition, as therapy, as vengeance, as admonishment and as optimism and as escape. But for today, I felt like it was better to get at the deeper heart of who we are as writers, and how our own perverted (no not that kind of perverted, relax) narratives about ourselves can fuck it all up.

Maybe that helps you.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Either way, I hope 2025 is a year of many words for you. And I hope just as you give those words your power, those words give you power, too.

See you in the new year, little chickadees.

(You can find 2024’s resolution here, if you care to click.)