Change it: “I want to connect with my readers”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by, as we’ve reached the end of our January series on changing resolutions. It’s been a joy, sitting down each week and discussing how to better our resolutions, before we get any further into the new year. If you haven’t been around this month, I’d strongly encourage that you go check out my other posts from this month, before we get into February.

As you know, this month we’ve been talking resolutions, and how to word them and write them so they’re things we can achieve, things we can work toward, and things we’re more likely to succeed at doing.

And this week, for the last week of the series, I’m talking to all of my established authors.

Change it: “I want to connect with my readers”

I’m so glad that you do! I do, too. I really do. It’s something that I’ve been struggling to find a way to do, over the years. With social media always changing the ways things work, it can be very much a challenge to find a way to connect on a personal level with readers all over the interweb—but it’s something we have to do, in this day and age.

And yes, this is actually one of my resolutions, this year.

But right now, it’s not a very good one.

What does it mean, that you want to connect with your readers? How do you want to connect with them? What sort of relationship do you want to have with them? Is there another author who you’ve connected with, that you’re using as a benchmark?

That’ll all be extremely helpful for you to know.

But yet again, I want to know why. Sit down and really think about it, really ponder why you want to connect with your readers, what it is that draws you to them, that draws you to want to connect with them and learn more about them and understand them and be a bigger part of their lives. Why do you want that?

Once you know, I want you to make a plan. If there’s an author out there who you want to emulate, then I want you to look at their work. Look at what they’re doing, especially on social media, and see what you can do to emulate it.

That, that right there, should be your resolution. Quantify what it means to connect with your readers, and qualify what you want to have, in your relationship with them. That’s the only way you’ll be able to make this resolution a reality.

“I want to connect with my readers.” Don’t we all? So let’s change it to, “I will open up on social media, reach out to my readers, and make a community for them, centered around my books and myself.”

That’s a good resolution, a continual resolution, for all writers.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Change it: “I want to read more”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking resolutions, and how to make them better. How do we take those vague ideas of resolutions and make them into things that’ll actually be attainable, that’ll actually be useful and beneficial to us in our future? If you haven’t been around for the rest of the series, I strongly encourage that you go back and read my last two posts—they’ve been incredibly helpful, even for me!

This week, I’m taking a resolution that I’ve also made, time and time again, and very rarely manage to succeed in. I should know better than to make it into a huge goal every year, because I know how little time I have. And we’ll discuss that too, in just a minute. But I also know a lot of other people who make this resolution, and I know many of them won’t succeed. Mostly because they didn’t set a goal, or remotely decide on how much of this they wanted to do, in the year ahead.

Change it: “I want to read more”

Like I said, I love this resolution. I’ve made this resolution, time and time again. It’s a good one. I love when people decide that they want to read more books, that they want to spend some time in a book rather than focusing their eyes on the television screen. I love it. I’m so glad, if this is one of the resolutions you made for yourself, this year.

But there’s also a major problem with this resolution, and a very big reason why many people fail with it, when they make this resolution.

• How much do you want to read?
• What do you want to read?
• What counts as reading?

Nobody ever thinks about those, when they start out with this resolution. They just think to themselves that it’ll be great if they can read more, in the coming year. They think to themselves that it’ll be amazing, if they’re getting a lot more out of life because they’ve got their noses in a book more often. But when they don’t qualify reading, when they don’t say what they mean by reading, it’ll eventually fall into “well I read a blog post today… I guess that counts?”

I know, because I’ve done it too. No judging from me.

So what I want you to do, if you’ve made this resolution and now realize that there’s something a bit off with it, is to qualify what you mean by reading. What do you want to read more of? Medical journals? Novels? Short stories? Historical books? Language studies? Whatever the answer, you need to take some time and qualify that. You need to know what it is that you want to read more of, in the new year.

Once you know that, you can quantify it—which is the other part where a lot of people fall short. Now that you know what you want to read, you need to decide how much. And for a lot of us, this is based on just how much time we have, outside of all the other things we need to do on any given day. For some of us, that means we won’t be able to read every day, but that we can set aside a couple hours a week, to reading. And that’s okay. But you need to know that, before you really set your resolution.

Why? Because if you don’t, you’re setting yourself up to fail, and to not really read any more this year than you did last year. We can fix that, right now.

“I want to read more.” Good! I do, too. But let’s change that, to, “I will read two novels, every month, in 2020.”

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Change it: “I want to be more creative!”

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It feels strange for me still, to only be writing one post for all of you in any given week, but I’ll tell you, it’s been a lot easier on my noggin—and I feel like I have more time to really delve into my subject, and really hash out the things I’m talking to you about.

This month, as you’ll know if you stopped by last week, we’re talking about resolutions, and how to make them better. We’re taking some good resolutions, and making them into resolutions that we can attain, ones we can quantify, ones that we’ll stick to because we now understand the meaning behind them and know why we’re putting more effort into these things.

Today?

Change it: “I want to be more creative!”

I love this one. I do. I’ve made this one, for I don’t even know how many years. I make this one probably every other year, and it ends up amounting to nothing. It suffers from a lack of identity, a lack of anything to latch onto or make sense of, and I know we can make it a whole lot better.

It's a good thing, wanting to be more creative. Creativity is something we all need, and something modern education tries to drill out of students (at least in the US). So we have to fight for our creativity, which I think is why so many adults make resolutions out of creativity, out of doing something to exercise our creative minds, to allow ourselves to think in a way we haven’t done in years, even a way to discover parts of ourselves that we didn’t know we had.

It’s a very good idea of a resolution. It’s just not a very good resolution—and for almost the exact same reasons as the resolution we discussed last week.

Okay, so you want to be more creative. What does that mean? What do you want to do, that’s creative? Do you want to start doing pottery? Do you want to draw? Paint? Write? Dance? What does creativity look like, to you? What do you envision, when you think of yourself being creative, this year?

Now tell me why. That thing you’re picturing, why is that what came to mind? Why do you see yourself dancing with sugar plum fairies? Why do you envision yourself with a palette of paint in your hand and a canvas the size of the wall before you? What is it that draws you to this particular creative endeavor, and why do you want to explore this version of creativity, this year?

I’m sure you’ve come up with a lot of different ideas, at this point. So now let’s quantify it.

How much do you want to do? If it’s dancing you’re thinking of doing, then how many hours a month do you want to spend in the studio? How many choreographies do you want to learn? If it’s painting, then what kind of art do you want to be able to create by the end of the year?

Make sure you set yourself a goal that’s attainable, one you know you’ll have time to achieve, or one that will stretch you a little bit. Don’t reach for the clouds, if you know you only have time to reach the branches in the middle of the tree. That tree will give you a boost to get to the clouds, next year.

“I want to be more creative.” I’m glad! I do, too. But let’s change that resolution to, “I will learn how to draw a portrait without a reference photo.”

[love]

{Rani Divine}