Nobody likes New Year’s resolutions, least of all writers. Setting out a list of things you need to do in the next twelve months can just feel like a list of things you will forget to do. We should never forget the unique joy that comes with not doing, per the great Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Nevertheless, January is not a bad time for new thinking. The holidays are past. Work is back. The nights are long. There are too many new streaming shows to commit to. Maybe you’re dissatisfied with what you wrote last year. It’s worth thinking about trying something different.

To wit:

• Poem. It can be (and, let’s be honest, almost certainly will be) a bad poem. But if you are not used to it, the form and the choices it forces you to make are excellent training. This can be like stretching for writers.
• Autobiographical essay. Write five pages about something that happened in your childhood that you never told anybody about. It doesn’t need to be anything earth-shattering or more consequential than a memory of a favorite toy. Write it so that some aspect of your life can make sense to another person.
• Joke. Standup comics riff on stage but they also painstakingly craft jokes beforehand. Write three jokes. Tell them to people. See what lands and what doesn’t. Revise.

Try none or all of these. The point is to do something that is unfamiliar. I spent the last many months in multiple nonfiction book projects. Once done with those, I will be trying to give fiction another shot. Most likely, it will never see the light of day. But then most of what we make never does.

The trying is the point. Keep trying.