Writing your memoirs is a great New Year’s resolution for 2010! If this is the first time you’ve been to our site, sign up today and get started! If you’re already a member but haven’t gotten much farther than naming your first chapter, make January 1 the first day of memoir writing. And if you have been making progress, set 2010 as your goal year for completing the work.
Goals and deadlines have been shown to be effective motivational tools for lots of things. And yet we know that New Year’s resolutions tend to fall off after the first few weeks. February often finds people back to eating too much, exercising too little and dropping whatever task they’d assigned themselves in the heat of the resolution-making moment.
The way to avoid this fate with writing your memoirs is to break down your big goal into smaller subgoals. By the end of January, have one really solid story written or, if you think you can handle it, a full chapter. Then set your February goal. Or decide that you must write one story a week, two stories a month or whatever pace fits your schedule. Then put it on your calendar, block out time in your datebook and talk about it to other people. All of those little efforts will serve to keep you motivated to continue, and by next year at this time you’ll have some memoirs to show for yourself!