A year ago I mentioned I’d signed up for a study on keeping New Year’s resolutions, and the main advice my control group got was to go public. The resolution I used in the study was writing a novel, so I actually achieved it, and telling many people I knew about it definitely helped me to get it done.

The results of the entire study have been published recently and it seems like my behaviour was typical for a woman – we keep resolutions better if we go public. Men, on the other hand, did better if they broke their resolution up into small (for example, weekly) goals. But the depressing overall result is that only 12% of the participants achieved their 2007 goal.

I’ve signed up for 2008 New Year’s Resolution Experiment (you can too, if you’re interested) using the goal of submitting a novel to a contest or an agent/publisher. Of course that entails a complete rewriting (possibly many times) of the novel draft I have, so it’s no mean feat. And right now I’m going to sit down in the living room with a cold drink, a good CD and a note pad and try to write up my full list of 2008 resolutions or goals. I’ll be back soon to tell you about the fiction writing ones.

I think that with a couple of weeks left of 2007, it’s too early to be freaking out about the resolutions I’ve broken, but my email inbox featured not 1 or 2 but 3 emails from various writing lists about which resolutions I managed to keep this year. So perhaps it’s time to look at 2007 as finished and start (very carefully) framing my writing goals for 2008.

In fact, it’s exactly one year and two days since I set my 2007 resolutions as being to:

• publish 5 short stories,
• enter 20 fiction writing contests, and
• complete a first draft of a novel.

One out of three isn’t too bad, although considerably the novel draft just got done in November (started AND finished), I could probably use a better strategy next year.

I’m going to formulate some nice neat writing goals (for fiction and non-fiction) in the next week or so, and I still like the short story publication and fiction writing contest goals from last year. More importantly, I plan to get down to the micro-level a bit better, and try to set more sub-goals to help me actually get these things done. Anyone who has a great tip for timetabling and scheduling that will work with me (a busy procrastinator) is welcome to comment. More soon!