I’m a big fan of taking stock of things at the end of each calender year, and I love dreaming up lists of goals for each new year. In my own personal vocabulary, a goal is something that you can easily measure and check off when you have done it. Something like “write a new book” or “run in a 5K race”. A resolution is more amorphous, more ongoing, like “be a more understanding friend” or “enjoy nature more”. So generally speaking, I go for goals rather than resolutions. I’ll be posting closer to the end of the year about my goals for 2010. This year, however, I’ve also got three writing resolutions.

Here’s the first: I will not feel guilty about sticking to my own writing process.

There are so many different ways to write, a whole spectrum of possibilities, and one of the things I’ve been recognizing lately is that understanding one’s own process is one of the most important keys to success as a writer. And yet, just yesterday I was talking with a writer friend about how we both like to take a relatively long break (I will take anywhere from a month to two months) between projects. And we both commented on how easy it is to feel guilty over that (especially when there are other writers out there who seem to plunge right into their next project within days or even hours of finishing the previous one).

I’ve been on a writing holiday since mid-November when I abandoned NaNoWriMo. Over the last month I’ve spent the time I would have spent writing on painting our library, reading, Christmas prep, and watching Project Runway (among other things). On the surface it doesn’t look like I’m doing anything remotely like writing. And maybe I haven’t. There’s a voice in my head that likes to hiss at me that I’m lazy, that I should be writing every single day.

I think these breaks revitalize my writing, like a good night’s sleep. They give my back-brain time to synthesize ideas and work the still-mysterious-to-me alchemy that produces characters who can make my plot outlines come alive. And even if that’s not true, I’ve still been producing one new book per year, even with those breaks. And I’m happy with that. I like that pace. It works for me. So why the guilt?

I think there’s an innate dangerous quality to the human psyche that makes us doubt ourselves if we feel like we are doing something “different”. But seriously, we need to get over that instinct because we are ALL doing something different.

So that’s my resolution: no guilt over writing the way I need to write.

What about you guys? Do you ever feel like you don’t write “the right way”? That you ought to change your process?