David Tate has as good a resolution as any for 2012: to write more. He explains:

In writing you create something from nothing.  Most of us don’t think that we can draw or sing or dance or freestyle rap but any literate person can write.  You don’t have to be fancy; you can write a story about anything to please yourself and create a thing. Creating changes you in many positive ways and writing is the most accessible of those ways.  One of my takeaways this year was how often I came up with something new while writing.

Writing helps you learn to focus

Writing is a very intensive focus-based activity.  You can switch over to a web browser while writing but the structure of words and sentences means you probably won’t do so in the middle of typing out the word “encyclopedia”.  In this way writing is a good way to bootstrap your focus muscles – letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book, obscenity by obscenity.

One of the points David makes is that what you write need necessarily be published (online or otherwise). In David’s words, writing for oneself “is a language of communication in which the sender is the present me and the receiver is future me.” Beautiful.

Combine David’s advice to write more with my advice of reading more in 2012, and you’ll be on your way to a more fulfilling year.