sample a by Yumiko Figaro | 1/3/25

This year, I’ve changed as a writer on two fronts: taking a writing course where I was provided feedback for the first time, and second by taking a different approach to writing. In other words, 2024 was the year I tried to look at it all from a different angle. I’ve always wanted to finish a first draft, to be dedicated to a thing and not hunger after another. Since I was never able to stick with it, I had to find different ways that led me closer and closer to the end of a novel. I watched as many motivational writing videos as I could and replayed my favorite ones each morning. I pushed through moments of severe discomfort, dislike and procrastination for the project, and kept forcing myself to open the document throughout the months even when I had nothing to write.

It was also the year I started reading craft books to better understand technique and how there actually is a formula to writing if you study it and squint hard enough. (I do have my own thoughts on craft books however: I have noticed reading them can be its own form of procrastination and unwillingness to continue. Researching and thinking how best to execute writing a novel is still not writing the novel.)

To yell at you a little about this presentation I made, it was an idea I had after spending a day out with a friend. One moment we were on the ice at the skating rink, our (my) hands flailing trying to keep our balance, and the next we took a photo. As I pressed the “shutter” button, I caught myself beaming.

It was unimaginable how transformed I was from my everyday self who was perfectly content to sit at home in the warmth. My friend and I, everyone out there on the streets that day, had all come out for something. And what was it? I thought. Ice skating? Perhaps. To see the sights, the New York City Christmas glow? Yes, maybe that. But mostly, it’s always to become warm, from the inside. Discomfort for the outside shell is minimal, the punishment bearable.

In this collage, I tied these thoughts to art in general. When I consume exceptional art, I feel small and inadequate in a good way. I think all we want sometimes is to feel insignificant in the grand scheme of big, warm things that challenge and shape us. Through friendship, through a particularly good novel or musical. We want to be pushed out of ourselves so badly that it makes us flail, reach for the nearest thing to right ourselves. I see all these things as related. I think it’s all we ever want, is to be knocked over and have a thing to grab on to in the aftermath. In all things that shake and grieve us.

I have many future projects in mind similar to this one. I see online people juggling many ideas and projects at once, but I can’t bring myself to do this anymore. Through the self-help genre, I’ve learned that to work on many things at the same time makes you infinitely slower than to work carefully on one thing at a time.

So that’s what I’m doing in 2025: honing in on second draft revisions even though I hate it, and am trying almost to squint my eyes as I write and cut and heave deep sighs every minute and every time I find unsatisfactory lines, pages, chapters.

It’s a process. It’s a learning curve. Whatever. I sometimes think I want to peek into the future to see how good it gets, just to see this isn’t going to be a draft always revisited and never completed. It’s going to be finished one day, I’m going to hand it over to make it someone else’s problem, and it’s going to be as close to the vision as possible. I just have to hold that image in my head and not change my mind.

Here’s to many finished novels, blog posts, smaller projects and collaborations in 2025. See you very soon.