Names: Elizabeth Flock & Lori Gottlieb

Current jobs: Flock is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, author and documentary filmmaker; Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author 

Previous program: Working through – Revising your emotional story

What are your writing resolutions for 2021? 

Flock: My resolution is simple: to write every day — every morning. Writing is a muscle that you strengthen or let atrophy. Now that I’ve let it atrophy, it is very hard to get going again. Yet get going I must. The step to reach that intention is to simply do it. It’s not more complicated than that.

Gottlieb: I’m going on book leave from my weekly column and podcast!

What lesson about writing most influenced your writing during 2020? What do you hope to learn in 2021?

Flock: The lesson about writing actually came from a documentary filmmaker: She said she seeks to make films on pressing social issues that her aunt who watches Pakistani soap operas and her cousin who binges “Breaking Bad” will actually watch. I think about my writing that way as well. I seek to write on the issues most important, but with narrative propulsion, so that everyone will read it, whether they care about the issues at the beginning or not.

Gottlieb: That I need emotional space in order to create. In 2021, I will be saying no to everything and stop feeling obligated to respond to unsolicited emails.

How did your writing change during the pandemic?

Flock: I have written very little during the pandemic, and tried to be gentle with myself about that. I hope others will be gentle with themselves about it as well. Someone said to me that there is a time to take things in and there is a time to write. 2020 was a time to take things in. Now perhaps it’s time to write.

Gottlieb: It was responding to the moment — triage writing.