A Writer's Guide to New Year's Resolutions

New Year's resolutions are a species of list which is why I love them. Many people don't, I think because they view them as actual things they're supposed to accomplish instead of just a writing exercise. But, like the facebook status update, I think making resolutions is a kind of Trojan horse that can be used to smuggle scraps of poetry into everyday life.

The perfect number of resolutions is the same as the number of witches or princes or guesses in any good fairy tale: three. So there's one clue already -- resolutions are related to fairy tales in their balance and structure, and the way they help us tie our goals and anxieties up with a nice, big bow.

And just as fairy tales establish a sense of balance by teetering between extremes, it's important to craft a set of resolutions that covers the spectrum from the transcendental to the mundane. Each pole helps put the other in perspective. The best example of this is the parting advice my mother gave to me my freshman year of college, right before driving away: "Whatever happens, just listen to your heart...and take your vitamins."

I think that some of the difficulty lies with the word "resolve" itself, which means several things at once, including (according to the OED Online, which if you have a San Francisco public library card you get FREE access to, hello, is that not amazing?):

• To determine or decide upon (a course of action, etc.)
• To cause (a discord) to pass into a concord
  
• To decide, determine, settle (a doubtful point)
• To disintegrate; to break up or separate into constituent or elementary parts
  

Resolving "resolve" into the different aspects of its meaning -- teasing apart its threads to better understand the whole cloth -- suggests how resolutions should be approached. They are not unified, impenetrable objects that we must either take in their entirety or abandon altogether. They are not bricks or cars or things that can be thrown across a room. They're not buildings that we can choose to enter or to not enter.

They're more like a fine rain slowly soaking into your sneakers or a jar of honey you can't quite empty. Viscous, grainy. Coffee grounds clinging to the inside of the pot. You have to take them apart and then put yourself together around them and you can't expect that when they're done they'll look the same as they did at the beginning.

Really, they're just a chance to express yourself in a different way, to take all the angst that oozes out from the space between who you are and who you want to be and put it into a form that is acceptable to share at happy hour or the office. They can be rhetorical figures, metaphors or something else -- just images, maybe.

And if your resolution is to write more this year? They're the best place to start.