Worthwhile resolutions

“This poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me . . .; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.” –Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

So Virginia Woolf wrote about William Shakespeare's sister, who was just as much a poet as her brother, but who never wrote a word.

One year ago, my New Year's resolution was to start writing again.

Getting back into writing has been a goal of mine since I finished college, but I never quite got back into it. As a child, I wrote every single day-- I made little books out of printer paper. As I got older I started writing more complex stories. When I was 11 I started writing in a journal daily. I began just after midnight New Year's Eve, 1997. When I was a teenager I wrote a few lengthy stories and many, many bad poems. Once I got into college I stopped writing for pleasure, although I enjoyed weaving a narrative voice into my essays.

I planned to spend 2008 writing a story, the plot of which I had a vague idea of, and reading 50 books. I didn't do either. I spent 2008 creating life and freaking out about where my life was headed. I beat myself up about not keeping a journal while I was pregnant, but honestly I didn't really want to document what I was going through. I was stressed out and miserable for most of it. And of course, doing any writing for the first few months of my daughter's life was impossible; I was lucky if I got to eat three meals and take a shower every day.

So, here I am, a year later, starting to write fairly prolifically again, for the first time since high school. So, my New Year's resolutions are the following:

1. Continue writing.
2. Be more adventurous, less shy, more confident, less timid.
3. Read, if not 50 books, as many books as possible.

"This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so . . . and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; . . . then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. . . . I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while." –Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own