Happy 2026: New Year's Resolutions for Writers

With the beginning of 2026 comes New Year’s resolutions. For a while, I took New Year’s resolutions the wrong way completely—stuff like “eat vegetables” or “go for a walk every day”. Yes, those are good things to aim for, but I’ve found that resolutions that have to do with what you like to do are much easier to do and end up making it a better year altogether. Since I made that connection, I’ve made New Year’s resolutions I actually want to carry out, and it affects the rest of my life well, too. But what resolutions will you really be motivated to do? Resolutions like “write 100,000 words” or “write 100 words a day” get far more daunting as you go into the year. So what is doable?

1. Write every day

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of “write X words every day” resolutions. If you have one and carry through, that’s fantastic, but they’re just too much stress for me. For one, I don’t use my computer on Sundays. Sometimes I work right after school and don’t get home until 10pm. Sometimes I’m out of the house all day for several days in a row, or at some sort of overnight event, or just plain tired. To write a thousand (or even just a hundred) words every day for a year seems impossible sometimes.

But to write every day is not the same thing. To write every day can apply to anything—you wrote notes in class? Fantastic. A sentence in your journal about how work went? Well done, you did it. A few bullet point ideas in the notes app on your phone? Goal accomplished. Getting into the habit of writing something, anything, every day can be the beginning of really getting into the habit of writing more on a regular basis.

2. Read

Currently, I’m part of a competition in which the members of the Habit (my online writing cohort) count how many words we write a day and add them all up to see which team can write the most in a week. My sister and I have been talking about it nonstop, and at one point, my dad said, “With all this writing words, you should have a contest about how many words you read, too. The input is just as important as the output.”

Since about three or four years ago, I hardly read at all. It’s very sad, really, and I want to. So one of my New Year’s resolutions is to reread all the Harry Potter books. It’s doable, I’ll enjoy them, and hopefully it’ll get me into the habit of reading more. My sister tries every year to read every book on her shelf, and I believe she said that means she has to read one about every three days. Clearly, she reads a lot more than I do.

Maybe you all already read enough. Or maybe you’re in the same boat as I am, and would get better as a writer if you read more. It doesn’t have to be “read every book on the shelf” if you don’t think you can do that. Maybe it’s just to read your favorite books again.

3. Start a Blog

I don’t know how long ago I started this blog. I remember asking my mother if she thought it was a good idea, though, and she told me, “Starting a blog changed my life. Everyone should do it.”

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to link my website to my blog. Now, my blog (previously a long URL containing Wix’s branding) is my website, simply zoecottrell.com. Another resolution I made is to post regularly. It took me a while to get the website linked, but now that it is, I plan to do my best to post once a week or so.

Blogging doesn’t have to be big or important. One of the reasons it’s so popular is because people like to see what other people’s lives are like. I’ve heard it referred to as sonder: the realization that every other person has a life as unique and complex as your own. Blogging allows other people—writers, fans of something, artists, scientists, mathematicians, anyone—to receive tips and commiseration from people who seem far more real than online articles or “10 steps to success” books. Your journey is unique, and other people want to know what you’ve learned and how you’ve struggled. You don’t have to post every day or every week. Sure, it’s great to do that, but you run out of ideas quick.

You don’t even have to do it soon. Maybe you write 30 posts first, then launch the blog in December. Maybe you close this page now and go find a free website maker. Either way, starting a blog is a great way to start getting your name out there.

4. Dedicate Time for Writing

Personally, I’d love to take a writing retreat. Whether it’s booking a hotel down the street for a week or locking yourself in your room for two days, having time reserved for writing is a great way to get unstuck on whatever your current projects are. If you take two days off of work, write just 200 words per hour for only 6 hours a day, you’ve already written 2,400 words. If inspiration strikes and you’re scribbling 1,000 words an hour for three hours, you’re already at 3k.

Even if it isn’t prolific word counts, taking time to do nothing but think about writing can be so helpful. Maybe you aren’t ready to start the novel buzzing in your head, so you block off three hours to make a plot map. Maybe the geography of your WIP is all wrong, so you isolate yourself for half an hour to make a map of the country or floor plans of a building. Or maybe it does look like saving up to rent an AirB&B for a few days and bringing nothing but a large pizza and your computer. Whatever it looks like in your life, taking time and reserving it for writing is a fantastic way to clear your head or get you unstuck.

5. Organize Your Documents

If you’re like me (and a lot of other writers), your Google Docs, Word, or notebooks are an absolute mess. Yet again, I’ll use my sister as an example—she spent four days sorting short stories by genre, character, theme, etc. Maybe this looks like sitting on the floor and looking through all your notebooks to see what you need and what you don’t. Personally, I don’t like to delete old writing no matter how bad it is, but I have all my drafts of The Otherfolk (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5.1, 1.5.2…) sorted in a folder in my bookmarks bar. Maybe you sort them in Google Drive. Maybe this doesn’t interest you at all or you can’t see why you’d do it, but it can help you clear things up, find old ideas or stories, or clear up storage on your computer!

6. Create a Writing Space

There are lots of tricks you can play on your brain when studying, like chewing a certain flavor of gum while studying and during the test. You can do the same thing with writing—if you create a strong enough habit, when you sit in a certain place or turn on certain music, you can train your brain to go into Writing Mode. I’m working on making my desk into a writing space of sorts. Eventually, I hope to have my maps on the wall in front of me, my thesauruses on my desk, etc. Maybe turn LED lights to a certain color when you’re writing, eat a specific snack, drink a certain drink, play music by an artist, wear a designated outfit. Whatever creating the space looks like for you, it can be a really good way to get your brain ready to write when you are.

Whatever your New Year’s resolutions are, it isn’t too late to make or change them. If you’re reading this in July, you can still decide you want to change what your writing habits are. And you can get creative—maybe you want to plot more. Maybe you want to learn how to draw your characters. Maybe you want to make a really good, really detailed map. Whether you’re writing a thousand words a day or thirty words a week, whether or not it’s good, what matters is that you’re doing it. Every word counts, if it’s a journal entry or a future award-winning novel.