New Year's Resolution: Writing more?

I ran across this column by Ann Patchett, in which she discusses the New Year's resolution she made to make a be more consistent and focused in her effort to write.

The main idea of her column is that writing is, well, work.

Anyone who studies writing or writes for a living, journalists and poets alike, are well aware of this.

Yet, it's a fact we as writers often shove into the backs of our brains. While we know that writing is work, something difficult that requires time, how much effort and how many hours do we actually put into doing what we live for?

Patchett discusses how influential this idea was for her, saying: "The more time I committed to working, the more pages I stacked up." It is interesting how, once you get the ball rolling, the ratio of work produced to the amount of time spent goes up.

She also cited being very consistent in the behavior you want to change for the first 32 days of the year as another reason for her success.

As 2010 approaches, maybe all writers should be thinking about what they will resolve to do in the new year to improve their writing.