October 2021 - Page 2 of 3

Clear head space clutter – Cancel clutter culture fog in brain

Clear head space clutter in one easy lesson I got from training with my Karate Sensei. It is of the more important lessons my Sensei taught me had nothing to do with how to fight. It was cleaning the dojo floor, soji.

No training or promotion occurred before we properly prepared the space for the work ahead. Before classes we had to run the dust mop over the glossy surface of the two training floors. Everyone was responsible, but generally green and brown belts would do it. We were all taught to ask one of the black belts if the floor had been swept.

This simple habit gave us not just a clean floor. It provided a kind of competition to be the one to do the work and gave everyone a reason to be early to class. The only way to win was to be first on the floor. This practice opened my eyes to see how so much in this world is interconnected.

Once a month we would fill four five gallon buckets with hot water, soap and hand towels to wash the floors upstairs and the training mats and floors downstairs. Then we would line up by rank, highest first to wash the floor in the traditional way by running the towels over the surface by hand. Before promotion everyone came in several hours before the start of the day and cleaned everything from windows and floors to equipment and the large sand garden that was at the front of the main floor upstairs.

Sojido Training

Sojido, cleaning, is one of the most important parts of traditional martial arts training. It is used as a tool to drive home to students many of the lessons of respect, humility, character, etiquette, effort, self-control, and so on we get in class. Karate is meant to improve your whole life. Soji is takes those lessons into the practical to reach far outside of the training time to use those lessons for others and yourself. In Japan soji is serious business.

Soji in Japan

“Many people are likely to be familiar with Japanese words such as Bushido (literally, “the way of the warrior”) and judo (literally, “gentle way”). But what about sojido, or “the way of cleaning?” asks Satoru Imamura, head of the Nihon Soji Kyokai (Japan Cleaning Association)
Imamura goes on to say, “People can only truly change through action. We believe the programming of a brain changes when someone takes positive action and moves their hands, mouth and feet. Sojido is a type of training that helps define you as a person.”

Kaori Shoji, a Japanese writer, states, “A lot of things baffled me when I attended a Japanese school for the first time at the age of 14. Lot’s of things baffled me, but the custom of soji — or cleaning — of the classroom and school buildings every day after the last bell, seemed outrageous.”

“Each student had his or her own zokin (washrag), hand-stitched by themselves, hanging from little hooks at the back of the classroom and used to wipe the desks and windows.

Mops, buckets and brooms were kept in the corner for polishing the floors.” Shoji goes on to say “Why didn’t the school have janitors (or vacuum cleaners) for these tasks, I would ask, while wringing a cold, dirty zokin in a concrete sink. I mean, shouldn’t we like, get paid for our labor? But in vain. No one questioned the chores — they were part of our education. We were supposed to feel rewarded for acquiring the skills and virtues of seiketsu (cleanliness).”

Writer and Soji

Some serious stuff there. Soji is far more than just running a rag over the floor. The lessons from soji for the growing student are deep and far reaching.

So what does this mean for the writer’s goal to clear head space clutter?

The writer would do well to practice soji in his own work space. The lessons above are in and of themselves a great addition to the writer and the writer’s process. But there is another great lesson for the writer that is hidden in the lesson. When we clean we are actually removing clutter from our lives. For writers no other reason is as important to us than to banish the clutter from our work spaces to banish the caos from our minds. When we learn to clean the floor, we learn also to clear head space clutter

Our physical world about us does impact our thinking. It often robs us of the ability to keep our minds on task.

Clutter Impacts

You are sitting there writing, but you just cannot focus fully. We are all so used to distraction that we often don’t really notice when it happens. Our minds are dancing off on a thousand different thing. You notice the dust on the computer or the static holding it to the screen. Off goes the mind for the need to clean it. That leads to thoughts of the floor in the kitchen. Which of course reminds you to fix the sink. Then you remember you need to pick up trash bags for the can under the sink. The expense moves your mind to finances. Before you know it you have less than a page down and the entire afternoon is over.

So much ‘thinking’, none of it getting your words done. But you do get the added bonus of feeling constantly tired, stressed, with a touch of anxiety thrown in for good measure. You also are now closer to your deadline, with issues over lost dreams dancing in your head, low motivation and lost energy too.

That’s a lot to lose for a little dust. That’s why the lessons of soji are so important for the writer to learn. To clear the mind is to lighten your mental load. In the end a writer’s soji is all about thinking clean. When we practice soji for writing we banish the chaos in our writing space to banish it in our minds and eventually our work.

Soji is also good for learning the master’s mindset, which is an excellent frame of reference for a writer. Here’s a nice start. Beginner Mind Surrenders Expertise Becomes Mastery

Thoughts

We do this two ways, mentally through tools like brain dumps or journaling and physically by cleaning our work spaces as part of our work routines or as part of our organization process when we clean off the excess files and garbage from our computers, files, etc….

Making soji a part of our writing practice goes a long way to improve more than our moods. It will improve our work.

Mental Strength and Courage Develop Committed Writers

Photo by Joren on Unsplash

Finish Your Long Project In 11 Steps

Finish your long project and clear it out of the way. This is not one of those big leap things you can not do over night. It takes a commitment over a longer period of time so today I am looking at what we can do to get our longer term projects blog, larger 10k white paper or novel done over an ongoing basis.

The Long Term Game Plan for Finished Projects

Just 11 simple steps are all you need to get finish the project without going nuts.

1. Make your project a new habit.

Working from a habit perspective means you need to work regularly on the project. In general this is a daily thing, but you can also work from a five work day plan or a work around like three days a week. Working from a habit perspective allows us to work in manageable chunks and make progress to our goal or deadline without the stress of trying to pack too much work into too few hours of the day.

2. Setup your work space.

Give yourself the added help of a single space where you do your work. Do not spread your work around so that it can be done anywhere. When we try to fit our work in just anywhere we often windup getting the work done nowhere because we are constantly fighting distractions. Working at one place allows us to minimize distractions. We can remove or hide reminders of other projects, your 9 to 5 job and limit immediate access all the time of our kids and pets. Setting limits, especially for kids and pets will still allow them to run in just to ask a question or give you a hug but still allow you to get those words down with some focus and flow.

3. Tell others about your time and space.

This is for both accountability and distraction reasons. Tell people what your project’s requirements, hours and deadlines are. Bring them in as team members who are there to help you keep your hours consistent and free of distractions when working. Everyone who might be a distraction then becomes your helper instead of your source of frustration. Our team members also provide us with motivation to write and get done on time. Trust me. A kid asking you if you should be writing is an excellent reminder that can not only help you with your habit but also give your child an excellent roll modle to copy in their own lives.

4. Don’t be available.

Read that tag again. It is your new mantra if you just can not say no. You want all your friends, spouse, kids, neighbors, the people in the office, anyone who might interrupt you that in this time period you are not there for them. You will not be saying yes to anything. The answer for anything outside of broken bones or profuse bleeding is a big fat NO! Only 911 call type emergencies will qualify for an interruption. This means when they walk up you don’t talk to them. You focus. That focus is a finished project. It is a bit on you if you are a yes type personality, but that is what it will take to get the respect your time and space need when you have a big project.

5. Write rough first.

Don’t cheat by staring at a blank page. Put words down. Every minute counts and so does every word, whether you think it is right or not. Cleanup is for later. You need words to work with first. Get that idea down. Cover the page.
Make an agreement with yourself that your time on your work is for just writing. Don’t use it for anything else. You can treat your edit and rewrite times the same way too, but that’s for later. First you need that draft.

6. Get over yourself. Finish that Project.

Your perfectionist ego is going to kill you. You want a perfect draft but that is never going to happen. So get the words down. Forget perfect. Promise yourself it can be perfect after your final edit…when ever that is. For now let yourself be messy and imperfect.

For the pantsers out there, present yourself with a problem and write your way out of it. If you are a plotter type, you have your outline. Either way, you need something to focus your mind on when you sit down. Professional writers do not sit down to wait for inspiration. They sit down to write. With our without a map, they have a destination in mind.

The best advice I have seen on this is to write what the next step is for your work when you finish with a given step. This trick can be used for both your overall flow process as you move from idea creation, to draft to edit to rewrite to publish or it can be used in a given piece of work such as a scene or chapter in a book or the next article you have to write for your blog or client. However you choose to use it, write down your next step just after you get done with what you are doing. It’s that little review is a great way for your brain to cue up what needs to be worked on when you come back to the desk.

7. Focus.

Whatever project you are working on from blog posts to a book, keep your work flowing by keeping it the main focus of your work. That could be a novel you want to get done or it could be a build up on your blog or it could be getting more copy writing clients. Whatever you are working on, that is your main focus. Keep it mentally locked when you are working on it. Finishing your projects will not be all that hard then.

8. Write for a habit not just to Finish The Project

I have seen some argue for building writing habits by writing something. What you write does not matter. I agree that you can create a lock for yourself to write that way, but there are several bigger problems that come from that kind practice. The largest being that while you will get in the habit of writing in and of itself, you will also avoid the main project you really want to write on. The result will be you do not have the real results you want (say a book draft done) about six months down the road because you do not have the exact habits for the exact result you want. Your habits will be too generalized.

Solution is simple. If you want a book in a year, that is the focus of your practice time. In practice we create the exact kind of discipline we need to fit the results we want. We want to be a novelist, blogger or copywriter not a letter writer to great aunt Gertrude.

9. Trust your natural work flow Luke.

One of the more subtle habit traps is using another person’s word or page count. You already have a basic word count you can already do. For now that’s all you need. Over time the your words will increase as your skills improve, not to mention the muscles in your fingers get stronger. For now learn how much you can do in whatever reasonable time period and word count you can get done. Not only will it help make you more consistent, it will also give you an idea how much time you will need to realistically complete this project and the next one.

10. Take a break. Finishing your projects need one too.

Don’t try to type for hours on end. You will burn out on every level doing that and your project will grind to a halt. The best way is to take breaks about every thirty minutes or once an hour to rev up your physical and mental juices. Just five minutes every half hour away from the work is all it takes. Yes, that means take ten if you have got a good 50 minutes plus in.

Use those breaks to release some cortisol and move the blood about. Five minutes is time enough to pace a bit or do some burpees or a few yoga poses. You can also get a coffee refill and grab a snack. Anything is useful as long as it takes your mind off the work and lets you release some of the pressure.

In general the longer the work day you have, the more important it becomes for you to take breaks. There’s a reason in the public sector breaks have been fought for and won by unions. They work. Without a break any kind of work for hours at a go will grind you down. Your errors will increase. For a writer this will mean far more bad ideas than what we really want and a lot more time spent in edit and rewrite mode. Save yourself some frustration and take the breaks to finish your project. You will come back to the work with a new energy, better ideas and things will work out.

11. You need fun in the sun.

Schedule some fun time away from writing too. Whatever you find fun, do it. The work is a kind of reward, but you need some other kinds of fun too. Life is a balance. Take a hike. Play with the kids. Share some time with the spouse. Heck grab some popcorn and watch a movie. Some say all work and no play makes you dull, but for a writer dull really mean ugly manuscripts.

Parting shot

Self-discipline is not just about controlling your-self or getting your writing done. It is also about how your life is lived as a whole. Follow the steps, adapt them to meet your needs and live your life on the writer’s path. All you have to do is start.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Writing Daily Habit to Discipline

Writing daily habit to discipline is a journey. The most common answer for developing a writer’s self-discipline can be distilled down write every day. It’s good advice as far as it goes. The trouble is getting that habit started, forming it into a practice and growing that into a discipline is a process that cannot be just gulped down in one bite. You are going to want to break this down a bit.

Where to start-know yourself and why

First thing to consider is what you want with your habit. The reality is you do not want to write every day. If you think about it what you want a book to publish or to have your blog posts up or add copy for a customer. Even then there is often more under that. he book you want because you have a great story you really want to share. The blog post is so that you can create a blog that is large enough to be your income source. The ad copy is to build your customer base and your copy business. There are thousands of reasons you want that habit. The first step is to know your own reasons.

Knowing your why is half the first step. The why you would avoid is the other side of the coin. If you know what road blocks your mind is kicking up in the way you have a far better chance of avoiding them down the road. Ask yourself what is holding you back. What are you afraid of?

The why you are building your writer’s discipline is going to be mighty useful as you move forward. Without it you are likely to quit when the going gets rough or your inner resistance starts up with all those objections, distractions or other assorted ways to avoid doing your work.

Take your time and create a rock hard reason to have this new habit. Ask yourself what will I get out of my new habit?

Use the why

As writers we are always working on new skills from how to put up a blog, to how to market on LinkedIn, to creating better pics for your blog, etc… Learning is part of the game, so building the discipline to do the homework is a big thing. Having a solid reason for it is a good first step.

The first step is to say it and then regularly remind yourself of that why. You are a writer. Write it down and put that somewhere you will see it every day. This can be at your writing space, on your fridge, your mirror, etc… Any place you look regularly.

The more places you have your reminder, the more often you will use your thoughts to act. Your thoughts will become who you are more instead of your emotions running the show.

Knowing the difference between a goal and commitment helps a lot too.

Be clear

The clearer you are about who you want to be and where you are now as well as why you want to create this new habit, the better you will be able to formulate your own strategies and mindset for becoming the kind of person who has those habits.

Many people see self-discipline only from the perspective to a means to controlling their behavior. That’s the direct path to the end game. But James Clear’s idea of “identity–based habits” offers a in interesting shift of the camera in Atomic Habits and his article here (and which he talks more about in Atomic Habits). Clear points out that, when we change who we are, we also change what we are doing. If we change who we see ourselves as we can more easily change our habits to match it.

Change what we see ourselves as

For instance say you are a TV junkie trying to get that blog off the ground. You have your writing plan in place and you are on day four of your new evening blog routine. Boom. Netflix just updated your favorite show, 26 episodes. No waiting.

Telling yourself that you can watch them any time is a valid call. The trouble comes from the self-denial focus, which given your much stronger Netflix junkie habit will likely lead you at some point down the road to a classic “What the hell.” moment.

You will kick that post to the curb and binge four episodes before the clock strikes midnight and go to bed with the promise of waking up early to get that post done before work still on your lips as you drift off.

Change the game

Now let’s change the game a bit. Instead of putting off to later, you say “I will have to schedule that one for next week.” I know it’s a slight difference, but a blogger is running a business. Business people schedule things in advance. You are locking yourself in by identifying more as a blogger than as a rabid Netflix junkie.

Psychologist tell us this works because humans have a tendency to act in ways we find to be consistent with how we see ourselves regardless of whether or not it makes any sense.

A lot of times this human influencing in technique can cause problems. For instance if you take a job as a reporter and you think all reporters smoke. However, flipping it on its head like this can help you master the very habits you need to be the person you really want to become.

Embrace pain

When we exercise our self-discipline we push out of the comfort zone, away from the choice of least resistance.

Discipline is a universal tool that when we build it in one area the skill transfers to others. That’s why when you work on your discipline as a writer, you can do other little things that will make your writing practice grow without writing. We are lucky for this. It takes a little of the stress off the need to write just to build the discipline to write.

More Ideas

Here’s a short list of other things to try. Just remember to give them some time to work their magic. Every time you work on being more disciplined you add another brick to your wall of discipline.

Become the Ice Man

Wim Hof is famous for his cold showers. Taking a cold shower for five minutes every day is a great way to both improve your body’s immune system and strengthen your discipline.

Take the stairs

Skipping the elevator habit works without doing anything special. You just remind yourself to walk that flight of stairs instead of ride up.

Do your errands on foot.
Pace during your breaks.
Read instead of watching a show.
Start a new class, early in the morning is a great.

If it costs cash, it might add some incentive to show up as well.

Movement, specifically movement that goes against an established habit, is another great tool to improve your discipline. What you choose is not point. What you want is to do something worthwhile that makes you a little bit uncomfortably every day.

Timers are good

I upped my own discipline by adding a timer to my writing times. My hook is that when the time is up, I have to get up and walk about for about five minutes. This way I fight my inner urge to keep on plugging words beyond the break period. That gets my body moving the blood about and I let my subconscious work on the piece without my conscious dictator adding even more for it to deal with.

My take

The thing to remember is that we develop our discipline all the time. A little mindful effort and we will find it easier to get those words down.

Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash

Writers Mental Productivity Habits

Writers mental productivity habits are essential for developing as a writer. The first two me habits every writer needs are to write every day and to finish your work. If you happen to stop there, you will be light years ahead of what many people do.

Write and Finish

The biggest two problems I have ever faced in my own writing have been starting my projects and finishing them. I still have to be carful with thes two booby traps. I am not alone on this. Every writer that has ever lived or ever will live face these demons every day. They do not go away or quit. Worse, they get better and more subtal with time. We get better results because we learn that we can beat them. Knowing that we can win opens the door.

The way we beat them is how we get our brain to shift into the process. We learn habits to make ourselves mentally shift and perform on cue. There would be zero books to show us the way to do that if that were not the case. The most experienced writers will still feel the fear. The demarkation line between the two phases of a writer’s life is whether you know you can beat that anoying little voice in your head. Knowing that you can beat it means you will will fight as long as you stay in the game. That’s why we read those books. It’s a trip into another writer’s mind that opens a vast repository of informantion and instint in our minds. I think learning from other writers is one of those essential trips for every writer.

Writers’ Learn from Writers

Every writer has a stack of authors we rely on for getting through through the learning curves and the rough parts. Some of them are people we know and others are found in books. I have my list of favorte writers I learn from. At the top of my list are Steven Pressfield and Vincent van Gogh. Rudyard Kipling is a close third for the poem If. There is brilliance in his poetic brevity. These are my go to guys for a kick or a clue about what to do when I am stuck, shucking the work or even going over the top in of a flight of production free ego. They remind me of the basics and to keep looking for the nuances forward. The fun part is, when I think about it, I already had the answer. I just did not want to do it.

That’s what Pressfield calls resistance. The malevolent force in our heads that wants us to avoid doing the work we already know we need and want to do. Often it’s a case of I just want to see someone else say it. Then I can let my mind wrap itself around that particualar stumbling block and accept it. I get to that point and I am pounding the keys down the path. We all need that key shove, even the the big guys we are following.

The Third Mental Habit

The third best mental habit to focus on is build your confidence. The mental menace in your head that tells you that you can’t wears a black hat and shoots holes in your self-confidence. The message he sends is not that can’t but that you are not good enough. Same song different verse. A little louder. A little worse. Our weak confidence is often fostered by held over feeling from our school days when the teachers both eagerly awaited our efforts and willing read them while also slashing us over issues with spelling, punctuation, grammar, flow, etc… This can be sent packing by a basic daily practice of writing. See number one above. Often we find that just pounding out our word count and sending those words into the world is enough to build our confidence and send those insecurities in our heads running.

We tend to think from our insecurities. We see getting published, even on your own blog, as hard, if not impossible, work. The reams of accolades we desire fail to just appear before our eyes and all too quickly come to the conclusion that we are just lousy writers. This is just the subtal work of our insecurities. Reality is often different. We might need some work on our writing skills to be sure, but we can fix that by…you guessed it. Refer back to the first two habit skills. We need to realize that the market is saturated with lots of skilled writers and that just because we have not hit the number one slot on Amazon/NY Times, is not really an indication of our skill.

What we might see as a failure of our skills or tallent is often more proof that everyone has limited time to read, and that it takes time for you to build up enough writing that sees enough eyes to really make a mark. Last I checked it took a writer between 10 to 20 books in the market for them to make a steady income.

Writing Ice Berg Ahead

It may shock some people when they find out that this was true before the saturation of the internet too. Michaele Crichton wrote over a dozen before he had a hit with the Andromeda Strain.

Bloggers

A blogger takes two to three years of consistent regular posting to get massive traffic and page views. The average blogger will post two to three posts a week every week during that time. When they suddenly become ‘known” they will likely have written over 100 to 150 articles a year to get there. A blogger will also have to master marketing, product development, the basics of how to make and grow a working email list or other financial support system and a how to run the blog itsaelf. That is a big project. None of it is visible unless they tell you like
Gary Vaynerchuk.

Copywriters

A copywriter promotes and writes dozens of spec articles and pieces till they start to land regular clients. Even then it’s not the dollar a word club. They get hosed at two to ten cents a word. Still they are better off than the novelist. They get paid for their practice. It is more than just building a large portfolio. There is also work to build a network for getting work and closing deals in the mix. It takes time to build those skills. The reality is your first year or three will be in the $3000 to $1500 a year level. However, after your credentials and skills are in place most tend to make $75000 to $150000 a year. If you stay in the game long enough $300000 a year is not unheard of. Like all other writers, the ones we hear about are the high skill end.

Reporters

Reporter will be a cub for a few years just learning the beats. Depending on the paper that can mean working for pennies till they can really start to work on the main stories and have collumns of their own. The big draw there is the steady nature of both the weekly paycheck and the daily work. For a writer the daily writing with a deadline is far more valuable.

Dues Paid

We often call this paying your dues. What it is going on is not just doing time on a cosmic hamster wheel. You are building your confidence. Repetition builds your skills, habits, and most of all your confidence. When you know you can crack out a thousand finished words in an hour or two and submit them on time for your deadline, that’s confidence. It’s more than just just knowing how fast you are. You know how to allocate your time for the background work you will need for research, client interaction, editing, etc…. you will need to get those words down on paper in those two hours. Confidence shows up when the process of getting the work done is no longer a mystery. You know how to start, keep going and finish. That is a confident working writer.

Resilience is the mental skill writers fall back on in the process of getting things done, regularly in large scale volume. Resileince is a byproduct of our condidence to bounce back from failure. It is as much habit as skill. In Jujitsu we say “Fall six times. Get up seven.” As long as you get up just once more than you fall, then you win. It’s that simple. That’s what becoming resilient is all about.

How do you practice?

How do you practice falling? Write more and get more out there. It’s not fancy. Nor is it new. It is a commitment to the mundane. Often that is what all writing is. We, to turn a phrase from Chet Scott of Built to Lead, “marry the mundane”. It’s not a fairy tail. It’s repeating our baisic habits over an over to master ourselves and our lives so that we can bring life to our work.

In writing I have found that keeping a perspective about failure is essential for trying again. We all fail in writing. I cannot think of a single writer, well known or otherwise who has not had a list of failures that far outstrips the wins. If they can get up every time, so can I…and you too. It just takes a little practice…maybe a lot. That’s where the commitment hits. I bet you know where I am going on this one again. Yep, that’s where the daily writing and finishing your work are again in play.

Nothing out there is going to improve your ability to be resilient more than getting out there with a new work and let the bodies hit the floor. This is how we learn. Not just with writing, this works with everything. The problem I have found is that at those times where I have had the strongest resistance to get up was when I did not listen to my higher mind set or gird myself with the wisdom of those who have gone before me. It has always been hardest to get up when I listened to that quit voice we all have or just as bad listened to the crowd of naysayers we all have.

The fact is the reason our critics say such negative things is that they don’t have the guts to do what we are doing. They may say they hate you, but in truth they hate themselves and are taking it out on you because you remind them of how bad they are messing up.

Talk to Writers

Whenever you meet those who are really working to get better, they will not be so negative about you. That’s because they are too focused on killing that dragon inside themselves to waste time doing the same to you. They also know that if they give you some encouragement there’s a biofeedback loop that will come back to them. Some call it karma. Others see it as positive thinking or optimism. The name does not matter in the least. When we give positive feedback to others, we feed two souls for the price of one gift. The biggest trick for confidence I have found is to give others some first. Then use that new confidence and resilience to shore up the first two habits and grow the process. Just an idea, but you might find it works for you when you try it.

Last Thought

On the writer’s path we keep working on our habits as much as our writing skills. They are just as important. Maybe more so since our habits are what will build our writing skills the most. Along the way you will find other habits to add or drop as you move along. Go with the flow. Look for answers in the mundane. Build the process. Trust the work. Love what you create. Rinse. Repeat.

Writing Daily Habit to Discipline

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Feedback Response is Important

Feedback Response is Important. Good feedback is like manna from heaven. Poor feedback can kills gains and even end your writing career before it even starts.

I like working through leadership books. I got hooked on the idea by my karate Sensei. Later the Marines hammered the concept of learning more about leadership. Today, I keep on learning for the main reason that everyone is a leader.

Always Leading

Humans are leading all the time. We lead in our social groups. Sometimes we lead as a member of a team we work with. At home it is our family or among our friends when we hang out. We are even leading people we do not know by our example as we go about our days. However, the most forgotten leadership position is that we are also leading ourselves. That is the one position we do all the time. It is by far our greatest responsibility. We screw up that and we send ourselves and the rest down the same rat hole. Our only tool is feedback. How we respond to that feedback is important.

That’s part of the reason I have been spending some of my mornings this year working through Chet Scott’s 365 day long training book Becoming Built to Lead. I really like his dive in approach of sound advice focused on building your internal base by learning about yourself from you as you work to improve your leadership skills over the course of the year. He has some great feedback in those lessons, like a walking version of Kipling’s If The correct response should be to see the importance of what he is talking about. Then apply it.

Lessons From Scott

Today’s little slowdown period started out talking about Lionel Messi of the Paris Saint-Germaine soccer team. It would be fair to say I am a distance from being the greatest soccer fan. I watch the occasional game, like when the Italians play the Germans. My knoledge is just enough to keep up with the game and appreciate much of the skill the players have. I even know of some of the better players. Though, you don’t need even that much to agree with Scott’s belief that Messi is a master of his game. Anyone watching can see that on the field Messi is in his element. He has mastered the game to an amazing level of play. Just watch him play and pay attention to how hard they have to work when he has the ball. The story is written in their faces.

The interesting thing is, as Scott points out, that he is very dominate on his left foot. He is not really the balanced player many people might think a player of his level would be. In fact his right foot is not all that good. This is for most players a distinct disadvantage. It’s not really a secret either. Everyone knows this, not just on his team but all the other teams as well. This does not stop him from playing so well. His strategy is to just focus on brining his natural dominance to an even greater level of play. He raises the bar to such a level that even with such insider understanding no one can touch him. He is proof that you do not need to be totally rounded in everything to master your work. Instead choose to become extraordinary.

Put It In Play

So, how do you become an extraordinary writer?

The answer for Scott is found in the feedback we get from our work. You need feedback and running from it is not an option. You should be running to it. Absorb all the feedback. Drink it deep.

Though, here’s the first key point….only learn from 1% of everything you take in. Let the rest just flow through you. None of that stuff is worth your time because it really does not have an effect on what matters. What matters is the work itself. That’s where you get your answers. That’s where we need to focus. We are focusing on what feedback improves your work.

The important point in feedback is how we respond

You have to ask the hard questions. Does the feedback even apply? Will it produce real improvements? That one two combo knocks out much unneeded information and clears your mental decks to really use the remaining feedback effectively. We all need feedback that strengthens our work. We can and should ignore the feedback imposters that stroke our egos like approval and popularity. So too, the negative side of the coin gets the bin. Focus instead on doing the work and your mastery of that work. As Steven Pressfield points out you find the payoff in the work. You don’t find it in the emotions about your work. Your pay off is the joy of the job itself. The payoff is better when you used the right feedback to make your work stronger.

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Writer Traits What are they?

Writer traits support every writer known. Without them very little if anything would be written. The most basic writer’s trait is that you write. If you want to be a better writer you write then re-write. If you want to go further to professional then you add in a professional mind set.

There are literally hundreds of traits for each phase along the path that writers travel in life. My experience is different from others but from where I stand now after having written and not written over the years these are the traits that come most to mind for every writer to at least consider adding if not growing in his skill base.

Kaizen

The Japanese have an excellent word for a process that Ford came up with over a century ago. Kaizen is the process of constantly improving what you are doing for the better. We are not talking change for its own sake, rather the work to make things and processes better. No system or method is perfect. Writers have to work to find the things that can be improved to make things work better.

Writers have many things to work on beyond the work itself. They also work to improve their own inner character traits to support and grow their practice, develop their thinking skills, become more resilient and adaptable, improve the systems by which they get things done, increase their contacts in the writing sphere, etc.. There is a lot of work that goes into being a writer, not all of it is just a simple scribble on a page. Taking the time to think about what you need to improve and what to do about it is a great trait for a writer.

Patience

We all get caught up with a lack of patience from time to time. No one likes becoming patient. We just like the advantages when we are. Writers’ labor in a craft that takes time for everything, including down time between drafts just to get the head cleared around things. Being patient is a key writer’s trait for coming back to a project or given point when you have given it the time for things to line up. Patience is the best friend you will have while you slog it through.

Long Haul Perspective

Looking down the road is one thing, but actually accepting it and the daily grind to get there is another. This is likely the one thing that kills so many writers time and again. We just cannot accept the realities of the road ahead. All writers want our work done and a nice paycheck. It is hard to accept that we are going to actually have to walk every step of the process to get there. Changing that mental reference changes the entire game.

When we understand the game is going to be long, we can do things other than try to sprint through things or just walk away. We can sit down and work out a plan and strategy for actually getting there. Our work becomes more focused. We become more resilient when we hit bumps, our current limits, time constraints and painful evaluations along the way. We learn new skills like how to break our projects down into planning, research, writing, editing, re-writing, and publishing or delivery phases. Accepting the full scale of the work, much of it far from the glory we have in our minds and much more painful, is a powerful comfort when the winter winds blow and your life everywhere goes off into the deep.

Only one shot

There is a constant I have seen in several of the disciplines I have learned from over the years. Be it water color painting, sword drawing, riflery or writing the key is always to let your focus go to just one point then keep it there till the work is done and let it go to move to the next. No thoughts of the future. No worries of the past. Just stay in this instant and do the work.

This is not to say you should keep pounding away on a project that is stumping you or is in need of a break to let things settle. There are times and jobs where the mission of the day is to just slog one boot in front of the other till the journey is done. You will need to break from them. That’s why so many writers have multiple projects going at any given time. From Isaac Asimov to Steven Pressfield, I have seen the successful writers recommend that when you are stumped with a given project, move to another project till the mist clears and you can hit it again.

Time–it’s important

You will not live forever. You are going to die. For the writer, or anyone else who wants to achieve something, there is no clearer message that your time is valuable. The thing is most people treat time as the least important thing on their list. The writer cannot think this way. You will not get back one second that you spend…ever. You have no idea how many you have left either. A writer must use their time wisely or find themselves at some point looking their body of work lacking to their own wishes.

The best treatment I have found for this lies in two facts. One is a commitment to write daily. The second is locked writing office hours. I have found that having a morning that includes a solid writing practice for my novels has provided the anchor I needed to keep me on the path and expand that path to include time for more professional work in other fields like blogging and copy writing. You do not have to write books. You can blog or provide blog content or any other kind of writing you wish. The key here is to anchor yourself and your time with a set schedule for your writing whatever that is.

Gotta be stubborn

The one luxury you can ill afford as a writer is to quit. You just cannot do that. No quit in you. That means getting back up every time you fall. When you start to grind down you turn ornery. You slog. Steven Pressfield says it best, “Stay stubborn.”

Be Hungry

Les Brown is famous for saying that “You gotta be hungry.” He’s right. Nothing replaces the fuel of being hungry when working to your goals. Hunger is great. It narrows your focus and clears the excesses from your mind. Hunger even lights the path you need to travel today. Things become very simple when you let your hunger do its thing.

Every trait in this list can be learned, practiced and grown over time. The first step is to choose to work on them and commit to the process, then start working through the hard questions like: How do I do that? Then answer it. If you can’t think of how you can do it now, research it. That’s what Google and the library are for. You will find some answers easy and others hard. Some you will love others you will hate. Deal with them as they come and most importantly, write.

If you liked that, try a look at what Thinking Clear can do for you.

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Writing Commitment Writing Goal

Writing Commitment writing goal. What are they? A goal is what toward go toward. Goals are one of the first great needs when you start writing. Have you made your goal? Can you ship your work? Goals inspire you to keep making progress. They are an essential part of the process.

Commitment is different. It is a pledge to yourself and your work that binds you to making a consistent effort. It is the obligation to walk the path over the long haul. You are there sunshine or rain or snow. The committed writer sucks up the misery, at times so much like a marine marching on the Bataan death march. Comfort and joy are secondary. It is the misery that you learn to enjoy.

Essentially your writing commitment and your writing goal are essentially the your writing journey and your arrival at the end of that journey.

Commitment for writing

Change your mind and commit, that’s what it’s all about. The armature will go off on flights of fancy. He will find things to do that are not writing. In the end he will find himself held back from the success he so badly desires because of those choices. His goals will remain far from his grasp till he owns up and pros up.

Committed writers reinforce their writing with a loyal daily effort. They move their work forward regardless of the reasoning of their fertile brains might come up with. Some of those issues are going to be right. In all reality most of them can be true. You might have to work at a day job. The spouse might want some time together. Your kids do need to make it to school on time. A writing commitment compels us to find those habits that are holding us back. We eliminate them to liberate ourselves with new habits and routines that grow our discipline.

Commitment Everywhere

I have found that commitment has often popped up in my life in areas without even my really knowing it was there. My black belt in GoJu Ryu Karate Do took me five years fo training. My wife and I have been married for over 27 years, after proposing in less than three months. I joined the Marines, found friends and a path that strengthened my life all the way to a full honorable discharge.

I have spent most of my adult life treating my writing like an anmature. It was the hobby that I told myself was my career path. Though, since I picked it up in high school I tended to treat it as a side line to something else. I planned to write in high school, even knocked out a novel rough draft over two years.

Though, the plan was to write on the side of another career. I have had sever of those over the years but I have kept on writing in many ways from small news papers to journals to a hundred starts on various novels to over eight/ several failed/ small blogs that never seemed to grow to dozens of other attempts.

Tying It Together

The most unifying part? Commitment issues. I did not really attack the underlying issue till I read Steven Pressfield’s War of Art, even then the book sat on my shelf after the first read for several years till I finally committed enough to decide to read it again. It was then that I made the commitment to read a chapter a day (Pressfield wrote in one to two page bites for the most part) that I started to change my mindset. I started to, in his words, “Turn pro” and “Do the work”.

It was only when I committed to finishing a book I had re-started several times over seven and a half years that I found the staying power. I had just 40 pages and an outline to start. The moment I commited I found the attitued to slog in with the attitude to writing every day.

Along the way I picked up several skills that keep me writeing every day. By far, the most useful habit has been commitment for getting my work written. It took two years to even then to get a solid rough draft.

The thing is it was after all that time I was in for a shock. I found the single book I had been slogging through was over 400k large, far more suited to a trilogy. The main victory was the finished manuscripts. I am still working on the edit. The drafts would not have reached the level they did without commitment.

Why Writing Needs Commitment

Commitment is the only way you are going to bust through your mental blocks. I have found there are seven things writers need to commit to when we commit ourselves to being a writer.

Time

The first thing that writing demands is your time. No one creates without the use of time. If you want to write, you have to commit the time to do it or something else will drain that from you. It is all too easy to let life choose for you instead of following up on your commitment.

The key here is to set a time you will write and keep that appointment. At the start, the habit of keeping the commitment is the most important part. Once the habit is set, then you can up the time to fit the kind of work you want to do.

Set Your Time

Not long ago I read of a guy who was determined to get in the shape of his life. However he had never been able to make more than a few days of any gym membership. The problem with any new habit is that it is a change and change is painful, doubly so when you are stiff and sore from the work after a good hour workout that you are not really ready for. His solution was to just show up for five minutes every day and do something for those five minutes.

We all know just five minutes of a random exercise will not get you looking like a Greek god, but the plan was not about divinity. It was about building a working habit that would not break. In his case the habit to show up every day no matter what.

The same mindset is essential to the writer. We have to put the seat of our pants in the seat of the chair if we want the words, any words, to flow onto the page. Rosanne Cash said it well in Composed; the muse has no respect for dilatants. All of us tend to be dilatants when we are not committed. I have to thank Pressfield for finding that one. He’s one of those little genius guides that kick your butt down the road to read and do things you would never have done. Thanks Steven, I would never have read outside books by writers alone without you and Rosanne.

Place

When you sit down you have to get used to the place. The newer the place is the more new things there are to distract you. For the writer, distraction kills. It kills your time. Kills space in your mind. Kills your work.

The solution is to cut the chatter in your head. You need to remove as much chaos as possible from your world as possible so that you can cut the chatter from your head and focus. The best way I have found for this is to have a set place that most of your writing takes place and maybe one or two others that you have worked in long enough to be comfortable as backups.

In my case my main place is my desk area. This is often where I scribble away when things are more quiet, like the earlier mornings or evenings after the kids are locked into a show or bed. My second is the main library of the local college(WWU). I also have a coffee shop I use for idea generating and general back work, but not for articles or books. It’s just not the right feel.

Comfortable Space

That reminds me. Make sure the place is comfortable. You want to be able to mentally lock out the notice. This was a hard one for me years ago when our kids were small and made a racket. My wife grew up in a larger family with far more noise than I and my kid sister generated. She came into the situation (running her own blog) already hard wired for it. I have had to play catch up on the space decluttering part.

Though like myself, she has had to find a place away for those times that even with her incredible monk meditation mind set she needed a place to run to just to focus. Here’s is a slightly different coffee shop. Coffee shops I have to admit are great.

For the price of a cup of coffee or two you can have a day rent office space with Wi-Fi, no loud kids, and a cheerful atmosphere that is both professional (a great mind set to have) and laid back. Work gets done.

A why

As with all things knowing why you want to do this is important. A why gives you a reason to be miserable and learn to enjoy it. Once you learn that lesson, the rest is all downhill. You do not need a grand why, just one that works for you. It can be love of the work, or you just need some money any money. All that matters is you have and know your why.

The pain/ In marine the suck.

You need to commit to pain that comes in the writing process. You are going to have to give up some things. Depending on when and where you choose to work there will be some pain. That is pain you will have to, as we say in the Marines “Suck it up”, courage. Courage is the only way you are going to say no to another drink with your friends so you can go home and get enough sleep before getting up to put in three hours first thing with your tenth rewrite of chapter twelve because it does not work. Courage is the only way you are going to deal with a spouse loosing it then still return to the words instead of getting a drink, going to bed or both. You must commit to the Marine Corp’s most valuable lesson, “Embrace the suck.”

A Plan/ Process

All writing is planned and tracked. Everything from books to TV commercials is planned. So too is the work that creates the work. That means if you want to be good you work with a plan and track it. There are lots of ways to do this, you need to choose what works for you and use it.

For myself I write my day’s project down with hours in a simple grid journal and I track my projects in a spiral notebook sized desk calendar with large grids. I put my project in one corner and note if I meditated with the kids that day in another. I track my workouts in my grid journal along with how many days I have consistently written every day. Today that current run is 1,169 days.

Tracking your pojects is more than just ego. It’s a closed biofeedback look giving you positive reinforcement to keep the trend going. I don’t worry about missing targets because I have a minimum standard in play to ensure I maintain the habit and meet my deadlines. It’s one of those little tricks I have used to make commitment work. Should I miss a beat, I know that my commitment will bring me back on line tomorrow. Winning this game is not about winning over the losses. It’s all about getting up when you fall.

Batch Method

Being organized is the other side of the process. Break your tasks up into small chunks. Keep the chunks small enough so you avoid overwhelm. Work in phases so that you create ideas, rough drafts, edit and then publish/ ship as Seth Godin puts it, individually. At the very least you should have a break between them, mostly to let your brain rest and your higher mind can work subconsciously without constant input.

The batch method is what I recommend. I did not get this till I saw a Tim Ferris video. Suddenly it made sense. I have found it works for some things and not for others. There are no hard and fast rules. You are going to have to experiment to see what works for you. The guide lines are to break the process down.

Ideas–Set a block of time up to work on ideas. Sit down and work only on the ideas for the project, say 100 articles to be written over the next three to six months. Schedule some time to research those ideas.

The writing–Your first block of time is for rough drafts, fast, no more research, no editing and just cover the page. Get those ideas down.

The editing–Now you put the blue pencil to the page. Be critical. Treat it professionally. Do not be kind. The rough draft is for creative and kind. You let your inner child run free. Now you have to curtail that child’s world into some form of civilized manner that other people will actually like reading.

Your First Step.

Commit to creating your plan and get it done.

Next Step.

Commit to get up when you fall. No matter how good you get stuff will happen. You will fall. The article will fail. The book will not strike the right tone. The sales will crash. The critics will eviscerate you. That’s why having resilience is so important. You have to commit to, as is said in judo, “Fall six times. Get up seven.”

You must commit to getting back up and trying again. Learn from your mistakes. Find out what you can do to make it work. Get the ditch bound wheel back on the pavement. Writing is a practice. Every time you create and ship a work, you learn something. What works? What doesn’t? Learn. Move on down the path. Trust the process.

Final thoughts

Learning to write with commitment is a process as much as anything else. Using goal allows us to master it. The only thing is you must commit.

Discipline Starts Habits like Sitting Down to Write. Move Your Project Forward

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Get Words Done Isaac Asimov Michael Crichton

To get words done Isaac Asimov Michael Crichton remain the role models of solid writing production. If you want to learn what skills you need to write a lot, you have to look at those who have written a lot. Since there are no off the rack solutions, you are going to have to compare some of them to get an idea of what common ground they share that I could use. I have found the most useful writing tools by looking at writers I like and comparing their processes.

Two of my favorite writers are Isaac Asimov and Michael Crichton. On the surface they seem very different in how they wrote. Crichton worked in intense periods for each project with breaks between, while Asimov is famous for not doing anything else other than writing. Asimov wrote in fiction and non-fiction. Crichton really focused on fiction.

Yet it is not their difference that made them produce so much. Nor are those differences the reason they were ultimately successful.

Love and Critics

The first key reason really comes down to the fact that they both loved their work. You have to love your work or it will not fly. Somerset Maugham once said that “Books can’t matter much if their authors themselves don’t think they matter.” A Writer’s Notebook

The second reason is they did not listen to the critics or even the inner one we all have. They listened instead to their own voice.

Asimov’s Process

Asimov worked large chunks of time every day. What he felt like did not matter. He got to work. He used a very minimalist straight forward approach in his writing style. His critics sometimes even complained on how clean he wrote. James Gunn described I Robot as :

“Except for two stories [of Asimov]—”Liar!” and “Evidence”—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent… The robot stories and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.”

Asimov himself was not offended. His writing is much like Ernest Hemingway’s. Asimov himself said:

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Asimov wrote in the flow, often producing books in just one draft. He said that when he found a point where he could not find a solution he chose to not resist those sticking points by just plowing through, but instead he moved on to something else till his brain could formulate an answer. This is why he worked with so many typewriters at one time. Moving gave his brain a rest so that he could more quickly find solutions.

Crichton’s Process

Crichton worked in a start and stop process on one project. He tended to work in flowing times like a maniac, from an organized outline, and often using plots out of Victorian era writing and was known to shift his work days around, by getting up earlier in the mornings, to keep the inner resistance down long enough to complete the work.

Crichton’s critics claimed he lacked anything literary. Bruce Cook said Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery was “written directly with the requirements of the screen in mind” and said “never really gets inside his characters.” Science Fiction author Greg Bear said Jurassic Park had “excitement in large quantities”, predicting that it would “make a terrific movie.” But he did not like Ian Malcolm’s “extended philosophizing” on chaos theory. “Long before Malcolm has his say, this reader, at least, was hoping for some more dinosaurs to put him out of his misery.”

What They Share

Asimov and Crichton’s work was not about tomorrow or yesterday. It was what they did today that mattered. Both focused was the work while ignoring the wait for the muse. They were the soul mates with many of the more prolific writers of the late eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Somerset Maugham pointed out that loving your writing is the most important aspect of your work.

“A prolific writer, therefore, has to have self assurance. He can’t sit around doubting the quality of his writing. Rather, he has to love his own writing… If I didn’t enjoy my writing so much, how on earth could I stand all the writing I do?”

Writer’s Secret

Both writers knew the secret was to read, learn, then Steal like an artist.

Asimov read volumes over a wide variety of subjects, much of which he used for grist in his works. Crichton read volumes, but his main source for plots was Victorian books that he used to create his stories. Asimov admitted books gave him both information and inspiration.

Writing is an act of faith, but every writer uses the muse. They act and the muse comes. That’s the faith. As Maugham said, “Fortunately, inspiration strikes every day at 9 o’clock.” Both writers knew and practiced this as well. You show up and start putting words on the page and things happen. Somewhere along the line the muse has to kick in. She can’t let you have all the fun.

A Time to Start

Depending on the time of his life, Asimov would start at 9 or 9:30 am then work to 9pm. Toward the end of his years, he would start at 8am and work to 10pm. When he was still a working professor, he would work around university lecture times with set writing periods. He worked every day, even on vacation with pen and paper instead of his normal typewriter.

Crichton got to work at set times as well, though he often changed the times to start earlier as the project developed so he would not lose the momentum of the previous day. This lead him famously on one project to rise so early that it drove his wife nuts. His solution was to check into the Kona Village where he worked round the clock till he finished his work.

Slaying the Inner Critic

Each had his own way to tackle his inner and outer critic. They knew the real critic they were fighting was the inner one.

Asimov tended to fight this voice by not fighting it when stuck. That’s why he, like so many writers, tended to have multiple projects simultaneously in play at various stages. When stuck with one, the writer can move on to another. In Asimov’s case he went this one better by having a separate typewriter set up for each project being worked on. He wisely knew if the work was ready, he would need no setup time. He could just start steam rolling over that inner urge to stop the instant he sat down.

“I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas. Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself able to write easily once more.”

Crichton’s momentum effort may have been hell on his household, but it did not fall down in self-destruction either.

Distractions Are Evil.

Asimov worked to remove the distraction in his life. He hated everything that kept him from writing, and even once commented about being forced to go on vacation. Another time he remarked that he hated sunny days because people used them as an excuse not to get words down. He also used this trait to make his writing more prolific in his editing process. As Asimov said:

“If I had the critic’s mentality (which I emphatically don’t), I would sit down and try to analyze my stories, work out the factors that make some more successful than others cultivate those factors, and simply explode with excellence. But the devil with that. I won’t buy success at the price of self-consciousness. I don’t have the temperament for it. I’ll write as I please and let the critics do the analyzing.”

For Asimov the editing work was done in his mind before he put words to the page. Much of his later work is pure first draft flow, as far as the paper is concerned. No one has any clue as to how many drafts he went through in his head before he set his fingers on the keys. He wrote with clarity of mind first then did not question what he wrote when he typed.

Asimov’s Memory

Remember Asimov is unique among modern writers for using mental reflection to write first then type out the finished copy. He really was sitting down with finished work when he typed all the time.

In How to Enjoy Writing, written with his wife, the pair recalled an example of his ability to do all of his work in his head then type it. Janet woke at 4 am and found Isaac wide awake. She asked if he was troubled and found that he had been awake for a couple of hours because he had woken up with an idea for his next Black Widower’s story. Amazed he was still in bed, she had told him to “Write it down.” But an unfazed Isaac said “I’m going back to sleep.” Janet told him that would mean he would not remember it later. Isaac told her “I will” and he did. He might not have stood out in the ancient days when the writers of ancient Greece remembered virtually everything, but Asimov likely owes a great deal to his flow writing to having cultivated this ability.

“For one thing, I don’t write only when I’m writing. Whenever I’m away from my typewriter- eating, falling asleep, performing my ablutions- my mind keeps working… That’s why I’m always ready to write. Everything is, in a sense, already written. I can just sit down and type it all out”
His ideas were the result of his “…thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to kill myself.” Isaac Asimov, A Memoir

Oats on Distractions

Joyce Carol Oats remarked that distraction is the greatest enemy of writing. We tend to think we are writing for five hours but in reality the interruptions from family and friends really make it closer to half an hour. Asimov was the poster boy for the possible end game on that.

Asimov Spartan

In later life Asimov lived in a suite. In it he had three main things. Five IBM Selectric typewriters, about 1000 books, 9 projects in various stages and his most prized view behind some drapes, a brick wall. He did not even have a kitchen to divert at meal times. He had his meals brought in.

That may be a little Spartan for some, but the lack of distraction is likely why he did not feel any loss when he sat down at 8am and did not quit till 10pm. He was not joking as much as honest when he once quipped, “I work whenever I am not doing anything else and I don’t like to do anything else.”

Asimov had much in common with many writers, even Steven king used a small secluded cubby area with a skylight, allowing form much needed light and cutting out far less desired distractions.

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” ~ Stephen King, On Writing

Wrapping Up

For all writers everything is about evolving change, when it comes to our writing. We work constantly to purify our own processes to deal with distractions, critics, momentum, organization, the craft and work of writing, but of them all the things we deal with the most important part is the love of the work itself. You have to love what you write or the rest of it will not really matter much to anyone.

Mental Strength and Courage Develop Committed Writers

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Writer’s Self-discipline Pays-After Work Done You Step Forward

Writer’s self-discipline pays. Everything you will do in life has some form of feedback that comes with it. Most of the time we can see that feedback when we collect a paycheck, see our book reach number one on Amazon or someone praises our work in a review. But there is also a biological feedback that we feel when the day’s work at the keyboard is over. We are not the same people who sat down to figure out what was in our heads. Now we know that answer and we have kind of a feeling of ‘YESSS!’ in our souls.

Self-discipline is the key to getting to that feeling. That feeling for the writer is the instant gratification we have sought.

How do we develop self-discipline? In that question is the basis of it all. Self-discipline is something that can be learned and developed.

There are some guidelines to get started.

You have to have a goal.

No one ever does anything just by throwing something at the wall with the hope of it sticking. You have to aim for something. Set your goal and make it big to start. Then you pare that overall goal down to smaller steps so that you can get there.

I recently read of a writer who had written an article every week for over 15 years. He said that his goal had never been to write over 700 articles but instead just to write that week’s article every week. This is how to look at your goals. Break them down to a manageable amount and then focus on getting that done in the set time. Do not spend your time obsessing about the end game.

You have a deadline for the goal…maybe. Small steps definitely

Some long term goals cannot be scheduled like a bus. However, your small steps, such as achieving your word count today or your weekly production quota can. The longer goal might defy the creation of a dead line such as becoming a world class writer on an article a week, but the goal to have this week’s article written or this week’s chapter re-written can and should have a deadline. You need to keep this. When the timer goes off or the publication time for the article rolls around, you need to hit the button and call it a day.

Visualize your goal, but do it like athletes do.

Most advice I have seen is to look at your goal, which is great. However, the breakdown I have seen is that then you are left with the question of Now what do you do? You are off on Some Day Isle is what you wind up doing, hopelessly trapped in the future. You have to reel it in and get down to the work today. That means you should practice visualizing the work itself.

In a study some years ago they took kids on a basketball team and had them break into three groups. The first threw free throws for practice every day. The second did nothing. The third sat down and only visualized throwing perfect shots every day. The results were along the lines of what you would expect for the first two groups. The first improved. The second did not. The third however did the unexpected at the time. They improved almost as much as the first group. This is the reason so many athletes work not only with the end game goals but also the process too.

Practice your habit first. Habits make discipline

Habits are the first step you take every time. They happen often without your even knowing it. Many disciplined people make it a practice to focus on their habits instead of the practice to ensure the practice happens. Done long enough the habits become a discipline in and of themselves which in turn reinforces the discipline of the practice. As Sensei Sammons used to tell us, “The hardest part of karate is just showing up.” The key habit for everything, not just writing, is showing up.

For a writer the practice is writing for a given time every day. To practice showing up you need a habit. For some that is a prayer or recital of something that focuses the mind, others use a mind dump before writing. I have seen some habits include writing a short amount of time like two to five minutes, putting down one or two sentences, or, one of my favorites is writing down just five words to get started. I like that last one since I have often found myself writing just one four word sentence when I was struggling to get started, but that extra word always forced me to get two sentences, often more, down. Had I been using my old standby of just one sentence, I would never have gotten past it on those four word days.

That last point brings me to another point.

Always try new ideas, no matter how crazy they seem. The point of sitting down is to get more words on the page. To do that you have to be ready to kick start things in different ways from time to time. Building a variety of tactics and strategies to improve your habits always pays off in ways you did not expect.

Keep consistency in mind.

Working on a single habit every day, like getting at least five words down is enough to move you forward. Everyone runs into things that will take us away from the desk. Most of those times it is nothing less than our own brain trying to avoid the hard things. Consistency is hard. However not publishing is even harder.

We lose things like money, self-esteem, confidence, etc… Nothing is built over night. Not Rome. Nor your ideal body. Not even your mind. Most definitely your body of written works is not either. The key to achieving our largest goals is consistent application of small habits that reinforce larger habits that are key to getting there. For karate the habit of training two hours a day three times a week was based off my showing up habit. The result was five years later when I had my black belt in Goju –Ryu karate.

Accept discomfort and get comfortable with it.

Anytime we want to make a change we are going to be uncomfortable. We are working outside of our comfort zone. Humans seem hardwired to run from uncomfortable things. We allow ourselves all kinds of distractions to help us avoid getting things done. Fill your evenings with movies, games or scrolling around on social media? Why not? How about positive things like cleaning out the car or paying bills to avoid getting those words down. Sounds reasonable to me. Many a writer would rather deal with screaming children or argue with their spouse than do their work at times.

Why is that? It’s simple. Because writing is painful at times. We have to sit there fighting with the blank space before us. Our only weapon is what little faith we have that inside us we have something to fill it. Our greatest fear in those moments…? We fear our addled minds have nothing to put there. Nothing at all. In this we lie to ourselves on this. We have a box in our minds.

Believe there is always something in the box.

Patricia Ryan taught improvisation at Stanford for years. Her most famous lesson was the invisible box. Ryan would have her students stand before her and pick up an invisible box with a lid. They were told to hold the box a moment then open the lid. She would ask them what was inside. The answers were varied from bracelets or scarves to rare or ancient items. The key thing to remember is that there was always something in the box. The students always found an answer when they opened the box.

Writer’s block is a myth. There is always something in the mist. It’s our job as writers to believe it is there and it will be, even if it is just five words today. Tomorrow it will be more. Eventually we will meet our deadline and move on to the next work.

Congratulate or forgive your-self as needed.

The goal is to get your work done, then move on to repeat the process with the next work. You start tomorrow. You win regardless of whether the work is a triumph or a failure. Wins are like laurel wreaths. They feel great in the moment, but they mean nothing outside that moment. A failure only means you have something new to learn and now you know what does not work. Try again. Both are little more than distractions if dwelt upon. They cannot really help or hurt you by themselves. Dwell on them and they become a very potent force that will bring all your efforts to a complete stop.

SEALS Know the Way

The SEAL teams are full of some of the most successful people on the planet when it comes to discipline. One of the many stories I have heard over the years is how they over come failures and successes.

At no time do SEALs allow their emotions of anger, fear, guilt or frustration to build up. Those emotions only drag us under. In the teams, the correct response is simply to accept, forgive, then create a new attack plan and act on it . In the SEAL view point they failed because they were adequate. Adequate is not really a win. It means you need to grow. Success is dealt with in a similar manner. Accept and release then go back into training.

At the end of the day, the pay off for writers is that we get to launch ourselves into this fantastic life that is writing where many less daring souls dare not enter. It takes guts just to be able to say for all who might hear, “I am a writer.”

After discipline comes commitment. Writing Commitment over Writing Goal: The journey over the arrival

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

Decluttering More Than My Desk Saved My Writing

“Decluttering is the solution”, I found myself saying when I discovered that too many books and files actually killed the entire concept of a desk. I found myself mumbling “I have no room to write things” as I moved about observing the desk before me. I know I tend to leave piles of my current work in progress mixed in among all kinds of other papers and spread out over the available surface as I think through the process. It tends to slow my process because the space is too full of books calling my mind away from the subject at hand or bills that want paying. I find myself looking at other things instead of the work I need to do today…Now.

Understand the clutter

Avoiding the clutter is classic stalling; some would call it your inner resistance. This chaos is the key reason to clear your desk. The rule of thumb here is clutter is fine, but only if it is the only thing you are working with. When just spreading out the details becomes a distraction because other things are mixed into what you are looking at, it is not a useful tool.

I am still far from perfect on decluttering, but at least I have cut the clutter reduced down from a stack of fiction books to read, a few various tomes on improving writing and the months bills to a desk calendar, a planner and current book notebooks, my computer (which is another source of clutter all by itself), One fiction book in mid-edit, my reading for my current book, writer’s mind practice materials, an expanding tickle file, a timer and lamp. It’s still a lot, but at least I can now work on my desk because I can see the surface of my desk. That for me is a big win.

Clean thinking machine

Second on the decluttering list is, you guessed it, the computer. I had no idea I had collected so many files in my One Note or any number of various files all over my desktop and main file storage boxes. It was a nightmare of going through all the collected pictures, memes, articles, idea notes, etc… Nothing was consolidated in a single file. Disgustingly I found quite a few times I had several files on the same subject all over the system. I had five on blogging in OneNote alone. Some of them were even duplicates of other files.

I would like to say I cleared this in one easy go. No. That is far from the truth. It took me two weeks to declutter and organize the picture and video files alone. I had to be ruthless. At times it almost felt like I was going to sacrifice a child or amputate an arm at times.

When I was done I could not believe how much faster my machine started to work as the files decreased the space on the hard drive. I had grown used to the speed it chugged through things along with comments from my teens on how slow it was.

Next decluttering task

While I have greatly enjoyed how much better my machine performs, I have liked more the increased energy I have not to write in the mornings. It is like closing all the open files in my mind, giving me focus again. It took my production from maybe half a page or so a day to knocking out three or four good pages in the morning alone. I tell you that is a lot when you are writing the story in a spiral notebook with a Bic crystal pen.

The next thing I take on next is the file pile that is my storage case next to my desk and the folder basket under my desk. For now I leave that till tomorrow.

There are some really amazing studies out there that show a cluttered space does affect your emotions, health and mind. It’s not a one way street though. We gain and loose with clutter. A messy desk can make us creative too. Like many things in life, it’s all about balance. Even the great Einstein had a messy desk, but you should remember that the area around his desk was not cluttered.

For a further look :

Time for a Kondo clean-out? Here’s what clutter does to your brain and body

Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity

Here are five ways to make the decluttering process easier.

Take one small task at a time.

Be careful with this one. It’s easy to take what you think is a small thing only to find that you are going to have a lot more than an hour of work in a hurry. When you do find yourself in too deep, readjust your expectations, but do not quit. Once you are engaged, just sink your teeth into it and get mule stubborn. Refuse to quit till the project is done, but change your expectations to limit your bouts and their times. Then take it on like Rocky. Those piles don’t stand a chance against that kind of force.

Limit the time you are going to work.

Use just five minutes when you start. You can quit after five minutes no matter the amount done. You’re done. You can do more, but five minutes gives you a running start and an easy win. This game is about the long term. You did not get into this mess in just an hour. You won’t get out an hour either. Decluttering is a process. It takes time to change both your space and your mind. Give yourself enough to come back tomorrow and have another go

The corollary of setting a minim amount of time.

Stop your work after a set maximum amount of time. It’s easy to keep pushing till you are sore in body and mind. The game plan here is to be able to get on with other things need to do in your life and not burn yourself out.

Do some decluttering every day.

Like anything else you do daily, working on the clutter in your life can become easier and more effective over time.

Congratulate yourself for every win.

If you worked today, you won. You can hack this. I reward myself with a note on my calendar to show I have done the work and reinforce the effort. Keep every trick to keep yourself motivated at your disposal.

Choose to just clean up first. Ignore the word declutter.

Dust has its own negative feel. A pile of awkward papers and books looks like an accident about to happen by itself. Adding some dust just adds to the misery. It might not reduce your weighty stuff list, but neat stacks sans dust will make you feel better. Feeling better when you sit down to write is part of the battle. Removing the chaos bombed landscape before your eyes will helps remove the chaos in your mind.

My decluttering findings.

The more I have worked at this over the last few months, the more I have found that I have less resistance to sit down and write. When writing, I can stay focused on my work without so many distractions It is an ever improving biofeedback loop that works. Give it a try.

Self-discipline on the writer’s path. Writer’s Self-discipline Pays, After Work is Done You Step Forward.

Photo by Matthew Sleeper on Unsplash