Keep Your New Year's Writing Resolutions

Keeping your New Year’s resolutions as a writer begins with learning to think a little more like your characters. One of the ways that we tend to be a little bit different from our characters-- and not in a good way-- is that our characters in a movie or TV show are really good at relentlessly pursuing these hard things. That's what makes them so compelling as characters. It's what makes us fall in love with them. They are going for something they want so badly that they're making choices every day, every scene, to get them. Choices that are so big, that are so passionate, the kind of choices that we wish that we could make in our lives. A poorly written life really is just like a poorly written screenplay. Everything falls apart when our goal setting, and our pursuit of our goals, gets diffuse. Rather than feeling the drive of our passions in pursuit of the things that really matter to us, what we end up feeling is the diffusion of the many, many, many, many, many other goals and things and crap that we have to deal with: things that don't necessarily serve that big superobjective. If you're a screenwriter, what you know is that the way movies and TV shows work is curiously similar to the way life works: the person you are today, is not the person you're going to be at the end of the movie. The person you are today is not going to be the person you are at the end of the screenplay. And that's really true whether you make any choices or not. What ends up happening is one of two things: either we're going to take the world, or the world is going to take us. Either way, we're going on a journey. The difference is, if we allow the world to take us, the journey is not going to be that interesting. It's going to be hard to root for yourself if you're simply getting swept along a river. So here’s an exercise to help you create that river you want to be traveling… the one that’s driven by the force of your goals as a writer.