Yet another year has begun and with it a good number of writers devote time to setting goals and writing action steps they plan to take in order to fulfill them. By next week or next month those lofty dreams will be nothing but memories for many of us.
This year I’m making my New Year’s writing resolution a simple one — to make sure that the writing I create is in line with my deepest values. This has meant, I’ve needed to spend some time contemplating what is most important to me rather than jumping straight into constructing yet another to do list.
Rereading The Passionate, Accurate Story: Making your Heart’s Truth into Literature by Carol Bly (Milkweed Editions; 1990, 1998) has triggered this new approach to starting the year on the right foot. Eight years after I read it the first time, this book about short story writing continues to inspire me.
This reading I was especially moved by her advice to write a list of values as a prelude to writing. "A values listing keeps us conscious of large virtues when we can so easily get lost in small virtues," she writes. The small virtues she refers to include "lovely phrasing, good metaphor, and snappy dialog."
Even though the small virtues often seem to be the safest ones and the most easily mastered, several good reasons exist for fearless self-examination and focus on the larger values on the part of writers.
In the first place, if we don’t take the time to become fully aware of what we care passionately about and what we loathe, the goals we eventually set and the action steps that go with them are doomed to failure. Too often these plans either have little to do with our core values or, heaven forbid, they may even run counter to them. So does our writing. When we don’t care about what we’re writing, it’s a struggle to stay motivated.
When we don’t care about what we’ve written, we have little or no sense of internal reward for having put our noses to the grindstone except for our ability to cross another few hundred words of output from the to do list. Lacking internal satisfaction for our endeavors, we become dependent on others to tell us our writing is worth something and that it means something. These others can be friends, editors, readers, critics or the almighty dollar. It goes without saying where that path leads.
If we’re caught up in mechanically trying to make it through our list of goals without knowing the bedrock of values those goals ideally rest upon, not only do we lose steam – our writing also tends to sputter and die. It’s a cold and bloodless way to live and a cold and bloodless way to write. Our passion is what infuses our lives and our work with emotion and integrity.
Following writer and teacher Carol Bly’s advice and example, spend some time making a values list. I’m shamelessly passing along her list, but I encourage you to read her book. It’s excellent and filled with ideas for moving past writing formulas.
After you’ve made your list, begin working with it by writing how you came to believe or know these things. Free write about the values on your list. Play with them by putting them in a poem, a story or an essay.