Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned To Make A New Year’s Resolution I Can Actually Keep.

I have never been good at keeping New Year’s Resolutions. They always seem so easy to make in the glow of the midnight fireworks, but in the grey hungover dawn of January 1st they start to sit heavily on my shoulders like a cardigan made of concrete. Blame it on a fear of failure, I suppose. As soon as I resolve to do something definitive over the course of the year — lose 10 pounds, finally finish a manuscript, take up some new hobby or other — every day in which I don’t do that thing becomes a day in which I have failed. And as December 31st gets closer and closer, that feeling of failure only gets stronger and stronger.

Luckily, I think I’ve found a solution. In her wonderful newsletter, Emily Monaco (who co-ran the Nantes Writers’ Workshop I attended back in June) wrote about her tradition of picking a single word to try and embody the coming year, rather than a strict resolution. For 2026, her word was patience; a fitting choice for someone with as many creative irons in the fire as she has. Honestly I’m amazed I’ve never come across this before, because it’s such a brilliant idea: a way of aspiring to something without being bogged down by specific details or letting perfect be the enemy of good.

Inevitably, I’ve found myself thinking about what my own “Word of the Year” would be. After much deliberation, I’ve decided it should be persistence.

When I first lit upon this, my inner critic gave a pretty hearty scoff. “Oh, very good, Phil. It’s very easy to keep a New Year’s Resolution if you resolve not to do anything differently this year. Do you really think you did things so perfectly in 2025? Because from where I’m sitting, there’s plenty of room for improvement…”

Shut up, Archibald. Let me explain.

(I call my inner critic Archibald. That’s a story for another day.)

The thing is, inertia is a pretty powerful force. Once you’ve stopped doing something, it’s very easy to keep stopping: in fact, it’s very easy to stop doing anything at all. If you’ve ever had a day where even getting out of bed felt like an insurmountable task, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Even now, as I write this post, I’m acutely aware of the novel manuscript that’s been sat on my desk untouched for most of December, despite my best efforts to block it out. It would be so easy to give in, lock it in a drawer (or a trunk) and let it gather dust.

Instead, I’m choosing to persist. To keep doing the work: both on my writing and on myself. To keep pushing the boulder up the hill, inch by painstaking inch.

What’s nice about choosing a single word to live up to is that it’s wonderfully open to interpretation. Instead of telling myself that I have to finish the manuscript this year, all I’ve promised is that I won’t stop working on it. Even if I only write a single sentence in a day, that’s a sentence that I didn’t have the day before. Besides: what is a novel, but a multitude of sentences?

It doesn’t even only have to apply to writing. Some days, persisting can mean that I went to therapy, or made it through a boring day at my real job. Sometimes, persisting can just mean I showered, or got out of bed this morning.

Archibald keeps trying to tell me I’m being too soft on myself. I prefer to think of it as giving myself grace.

Happy New Year, everybody. I hope that you find a word to embody in 2026, and I hope that, in spite of what may come, you too will persist.

Since I stole her idea for this, please subscribe to Emily’s newsletter, Emily in France. She’s a terrific writer and a thoroughly lovely human being, who has probably forgotten more facts about cheese than most people learn in a lifetime. She also hosts a delightful podcast called Fishwives of Paris, all about the history of French cuisine.