On January 3, from 6 to 8 pm, join Cathy Pickens for a FREE session to explore how you can make space and time for your creative work in 2019. Come celebrate the start of your creative new year! Space is limited, and pre-registration is required.

‘Tis the season for resolutions, to take stock of seasons past. Most of us dust off the old list: lose weight, make it to more of the kids’ ballgames. Or we just don’t bother, resolving to plug along as near-perfect as we are. New Year’s Resolutions have become passé, predictable, reliable only in reminding us of failures past.

This year, why not try some anti-resolutions—what you’ll stop doing this year?

1. Stop ignoring what’s around you. Take real notice of the people and things that make your life run smoothly, more pleasantly. Take a deep breath when you walk out in the crisp air. Develop a child-like curiosity about even the most mundane. Write it down, to let yourself see what you’re thinking. Scribble on a legal pad or in the back of your DayTimer—nothing fancy needed. Creativity and “flow” expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests noting one thing each day that surprises you, as a way to awaken your awareness and broaden your focus. Talk to yourself on paper about how to solve a problem. Ask yourself “what if …?” and “why?” You’ll be surprised how it helps you focus. Be mindful.
2. Stop taking the easy path. Try something that scares you—or at least stretches you. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, an object at rest tends to stay there. Conversely, as Matthew Arnold observed, “Genius is mainly an affair of energy.” Accept a speaking engagement, hike up Crowder’s Mountain, take a ballroom dance or cooking or kayaking class for fun, or work on that (writing) project you’ve been promising you’ll start. Each new task requires initiative and risk-taking for the beginner but gets easier—once you’ve done it. Get moving, preferably along an uncharted path.
3. Stop being one-sided. Learn the delicate art of balance. Aristotle urged us to seek the Golden Mean, emphasizing the importance of balance. Where are you out of balance? Develop where you feel weakest. Read something you wouldn’t ordinarily read. If your bedside books are all history or technical manuals, try some well-written fiction or a book you loved—or wished you’d read—when you were a kid. Try listening to a book on tape (the library will loan you one for free!). Visit the Mint Museums. Turn off the TV.
4. Stop sitting in the same seat. Perception can be more powerful than reality. Practice sitting in someone else’s seat, seeing from her perspective, testing your own. Maybe you, literally, sit in someone else’s seat in a meeting, to break the routine. Look at an issue from your customer’s or co-worker’s or boss’s or sales clerk’s or child’s or spouse’s or mortal enemy’s place.
5. Stop being inconsistent. What do you value? What’s important to you? Would someone know your values by what you say, by how you spend your time, by the decisions you make? In trying new things, make sure you’ve grounded yourself, that you know who you are. Take time to nurture your spiritual life. Philosopher William James said, “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” That wisdom cannot be gained in the push and pull of your busy life. Be still. Turn off the car radio. Get off the treadmill and take a walk outside. Be alone with your thoughts. Recognize who you are and what you value.
6. Stop being so serious. When was the last time you felt inspired or motivated by a humorless drudge? Does the fate of the free world actually rest on what you’re doing? Okay, maybe it does. But you can still lighten up.

Oh, yeah. Stop promising to get in shape and just get moving. Hit the gym or the sidewalk. Getting enough exercise is more important than your pant size. You’ll need the energy for all the things you’re going to stop doing this year.

Cathy Pickens’ first mystery, Southern Fried, won the coveted St. Martin’s Press Malice Domestic Award for Best Traditional Mystery. She’s written five books in the series, as well as Charleston Mysteries (History Press), an essay on historic crime cases in 27 Views of Charlotte, a regular column for Mystery Readers Journal, and articles on writing craft and on business. She served as national president of Sisters in Crime and on the national board for Mystery Writers of America. As a long-time professor in the McColl School of Business at Queens, she won numerous teaching awards.

Charlotte writers have an extraordinary opportunity for engagement at the North Carolina Writers Network Fall Conference on November 2-4. Classes are offered in a variety of genres, including Lisa Zerkle’s class, “How to be a Well-Versed Citizen of the Poetry World.” Registration is open now.

There’s someone new in town, just arrived with the poems she wrote in a state of thrilled, urgent uncertainty. She knows she doesn’t know enough about writing but still wants more of that electric, creative state. Also new around these parts is that older guy who’s been writing on the side for years, dashing off a poem here and there and saving them for later. It’s later now, he has some time, time he wants to invest in this writing thing he’s thought so long about.

Look around. You’ll see these people, so many of them, newly arrived on the shores of poetry. They’ve thrown open the metal hatches of the getaway pods they used to escape the non-writing world they’ve left behind. They’re clambering out, duct-taped valises full of rough drafts in hand, taking their first steps into this new place. I’m here! they say. What’s next?

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be an engaged citizen of the literary world. If this land has served us as a respite—a place with welcoming plazas and warm hearths, challenging teachers and encouraging colleagues—if we want this land to continue to thrive both for us and for the next wave of new arrivals, what’s required?

The archetype of the solitary writer, toiling alone in a garret ensconced in a haze of cigarette smoke and angst, has never been wholly accurate. Of course as writers we know the joy and sorrow of approaching the page. Stacking up lines, tearing them down, rearranging their constituent parts. What we do before and after that, however, is equally essential, I argue, and necessary to keep our literary world thriving.

Toni Morrison’s well-known encouragement reminds us that, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” By extension, if we want a vibrant, expansive literary world, we must build it. First—of course—we write, we revise. But not just that. Our writing should include book reviews, author appreciations, essays on craft which constitute another necessary facet of our writing. If we’re to articulate these reflections in a cogent way, we’re also reading broadly. Bill Griffin, a fine poet and an excellent literary citizen, recently took two notably different books along on a trip. The first, a short story collection by an author who is, he says, “bizarre, eclectic, impossible to categorize.” The second, by a poet who is “grounded and true; when I read his poems I am always amazed that something that seems so simple can be so deep.” This diversity of reading material results in “conflicting bits, the novel and the orderly, the stable and the radioactive, bouncing around in my head. What’s going to happen? Poems grow out of that stuff,” he says.

So, writing, reading, and then? I know Bill from my time serving on the board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. After I became serious about poetry, NCPS named one of the poems I’d really toiled over as a finalist for an award. I hadn’t won, but even that minor recognition validated my efforts. When, a few years later, I was asked to help out on the board, I agreed as a way of paying it forward. When I needed advice on literary citizenship, friends from my writing tribe—like Bill—came through.

Our lives are busy and not everyone can make time for a board position. But all writers can do something, say, attend a reading or an open mic, sign up for a workshop, get the word out about an upcoming book release or lit event. Someday, when your own book is fresh from the press, you’ll want a strong community there to write rave reviews, invite you to readings, send you notes of appreciation for your writing.

Don’t you want that? Introverts, this also means you. Get out there and engage with your people. Now’s the time to build that community, just as when you took your first steps into the writing world, someone was there to welcome you. Someone who offered to read one the poems sliding out from that duct-taped valise, someone who said, “This way. We’re all here together.”

Lisa Zerkle is the Curator of Charlotte Lit’s 4X4CLT Poetry and Art poster series.

Editor’s note: The following piece began as a Facebook post written by novelist Wiley Cash (The Last Ballad and others). Since it first appeared on June 29, it’s been shared 53 times and is now posted on Cash’s website. We asked to reprint the post here because it’s an important and thoughtful consideration on what it takes to build a life as a successful writer. Cash has also recently announced a new book club focused on bringing attention to literary diversity.

by Wiley Cash

Last night I had dinner and beers with a good friend of mine who’s also a successful, well published writer, the kind of writer whose career a lot of us would look at with envy. I’ve been thinking about him and the things we talked about all day. Here goes.

When people learn that I’m a writer, I’ll often hear things like, “I would love to write, but I don’t have the time” or “It must be amazing to sit at your desk all day and write your book.” Years ago, when my wife and I first moved in to our neighborhood, a woman down the street told me that whenever she passed our house while walking her dog she thought about me inside, sitting at my desk, working on a novel. She said this wistfully, as if it were the most peaceful life she could imagine.

Over the past six years I’ve published three novels and a bunch of stories and essays. My friend that I had dinner with last night has published more books and essays than I have, and his career has been a little longer and his work has sold better than mine. But our books and works-in-progress are not what we talk about when we meet for dinner and beers. We talk about the hustle. We talk about health insurance. We talk about how the non-writing work or teaching gigs or the conference workshop or the writing gig we have to take will limit our time at the desk. We talk about the calls we get from Hollywood people and whether or not we should believe them when they ask us to do work for free in the hope someone will buy it. We talk about invitations to speak at libraries, universities, and civic groups. How much will they pay us? How much can we expect? How much is it worth to be away from our family for ANOTHER night? Should we include driving time and flying time and sitting in the airport time? Should we be honest about how one hour of “work” requires 36 hours of travel and preparation? We talk about blurbs, both the asking for them and the being asked to provide them. We talk about the book business and how we feel about our agents and editors. We talk about the hope we have that the next book will be the one that helps us get to the point where we won’t have to have the conversations that we keep having.

Most of my friends are writers, and very few of them are what would be considered well off. All of them hustle. All them bust their ass, both on their writing and on their careers. There are only a handful of writers in this country who don’t have numerous side hustles. I can think of only two or three I know personally, but they still bust their asses at the desk and turn out great work.

I guess what I’m getting at is this: the book on the shelf is not the product of the writing life; in most cases it’s the by-product of the writing life, which is often less about writing and more about trying to keep you and your family’s life as stable as possible. A lot of jobs are hard, and a lot of people don’t get paid what they deserve. But the tricky thing in this business is that you may work harder than you could ever imagine on a project you believe in, and then no one publishes your book or buys your script, and you don’t get paid at all. So you teach. You edit. You write for magazines. You travel. You give keynotes. You spend weeks per year away from your family. You worry about insurance and your mortgage and your kids’ tuition and car payments. And when you put your head on the pillow your mind goes to the place where your work lives hot and bright in your imagination, and you fall asleep hoping and praying that it will be the work that finally rewards the hustle of the life you’ve chosen. You think about sitting at the desk where you’re working on your book and looking out the window. Your neighbor passes by with her dog, and you hope that one day she’ll be 100% right in thinking, A writer lives there.

Wiley Cash is the New York Times best selling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina.