1/1/05: New Year, New Resolutions

As you go about the new year, reflecting upon your lives and making resolutions to enhance it, I offer you a writer's perspective and urge you to adopt the literary meaning of resolution.

In literary jargon, a resolution is the point in a story at which the chief dramatic complication is worked out.

Have you ever read a book or watched a play or movie that had no resolution? Where nothing was resolved, the conflicts presented throughout the story still existed, and the characters had no growth, closure or vindication in the end?

How did that make you feel? Even knowing that the characters in the novel, movie or play were fiction, I still feel pretty unsettled.

In real life, we are not fictional characters and unfortunately this is what happens to us when we break a resolution. The dramatic complication in our story, our lives basically, goes unresolved. We must be authors of our own lives and create the resolution for our hero in our own life story. We are the hero in our story. We are also the villain, the supporting characters, the director, the producer and the writer.

Do not let your story go unresolved. Do not let your characters, especially your hero, die without resolution. Commit to finding resolution now. Create the change, the growth and the closure you need, right now, for whatever dramatic complication you have in your life at this very moment.

Do it now and you will not feel unsettled when your story ends.