While it can be a great time of year to start setting goals for the future and planning out what you might work on next, it’s also important to use the last few weeks of a year to look back on all you’ve accomplished in the last 12 months.
If you’ve written ANYTHING this calendar year, you deserve to be proud of yourself and reward yourself for what you’ve accomplished. Because while we might often think that only certain writing accomplishments “count,” the fact that you’ve written at all is, let’s be honest, a miracle. Let me explain.
All Writing Counts, Even Unpublished Work
If you’re sitting down and putting pen to paper — literally or figuratively — it counts. It doesn’t have to be published, or accepted for publishing in the future. It doesn’t have to be polished. It certainly doesn’t have to be good. Writing is writing. If you wrote anything this year, even if it was only a few hundred words, it matters. Because your writing matters, and so do you.
You’re never going to learn to be proud of the work you’ve done if you only measure your writing success by how many people have (or haven’t) read it. The bulk of the work, the hardest part — and the part that not everyone can do, no matter how much they might want to — is the actual writing. The part you do that no one else can see. If you wrote, you rock.
Most Aspiring Writers Aren’t Doing What You’re Doing
A lot of people say they want to be writers, or truly believe it’s in the cards for them, but never actually put in the real effort it takes to make it happen. You can be an aspiring writer (wanting to write) and a working writer (actually writing), but you can’t be a working writer (actually writing) unless you’re doing the thing. That means showing up, sitting down, and turning blank pages into works of art. Even if it’s one sentence at a time. Even if it’s slow. Even if it’s not perfect.
You’re a minority if you’re actually writing, because it’s one thing to say you’ll do it and another thing entirely to actually have done it. You deserve to celebrate the work you’ve done as a real, huge accomplishment. It doesn’t matter how much you wrote, or if you finished what you started. You’re doing it. And you’re absolutely amazing for that. You deserve a treat.
Celebrating Your Wins Matters Just as Much as Winning
Writing is hard. It demands that even on your worst days, you set everything else aside and craft a story of some kind. It requires you to be vulnerable, and make sacrifices in your personal and professional life. Writing is hard because writing is work. And if you’ve reached the end of the year, and you’ve done the work, you deserve to celebrate. No matter how small.
Taking time to acknowledge and reward yourself for your accomplishments as a writer is the first step in training your brain to truly believe that writing equals success, even when it’s just in a document saved on your hard drive or your own handwriting in a notebook. The more you celebrate a job well done, the more motivated you might be to do more work in the future.
Now go ahead — take a break, if you’re not on deadline. You’ve earned it.
Meg Dowell Writes 