Discipline Starts Habits. Habits start your new article, a new chapter or any new project. Starting can be hard at times. While it is mostly comes down to a matter of habit that will get you into the chair, sometimes you need a few tricks to get working when you are still building the new habit or things have gotten in the way. Here are some of the tricks I have used to make my writing habit take root.
Setup
Set your computer to pull up your Notepad, One Note, Scribner, Word, Google docs, your blog’s word press page or whatever other program you use to write on startup. That simple hack helps your discipline start the habit with very little effort.
This seems like a simple idea but it is powerful, if you use it to start working first thing. The best part of this trick is that it makes starting a no brainier every time you turn on your machine. This one step change eliminates distractions like your email account, social media, or any other online distraction you can think of.
While I was first building a daily writing habit, I found it the only way to kill off other distraction for my time at the start of my work day.
Write
Plan a time to write every day. This is more for the long term, but writing should be a long term thing. Treat it like it is. Plan for it like any other long term thing in your life like say going to your job. The mind trick is to remember that writing is more of an endurance race than a quarter mile sprint. Learning what how the pros approach their practice is not a bad idea either. You might learn something.
Mindset activates discipline starts habits
Change your mindset. If you are letting your work go undone it is likely you have a mix of feelings over it. They can range from fear to frustration. Not one of those feelings is going to help you get words on the page. That’s not their job. They are here to stop you. You have to sit down to stop them in their tracks.
That means how you view writing is using the wrong mental habit set. Ask yourself a few questions about your process. How do you see your writing? Is it a side job? Do you see it as part time? Is it something that can be moved around or avoided just because you choose to? In short, do you see it as important?
Chances are you like to think of it as important, in fact so very important. The problem is you don’t really treat it like it is important. Don’t worry. You are not off the island. It just means you have to jump into our little old attitude adjustment chamber.
Attitude Adjustment Chamber
You need to treat your writing as you would your job. Nothing gets your pants in the chair like a job does. If you don’t show up, you pay for that. If you show up, you get paid for that. Writing works the same way.
Hold the phone. I can hear the rationalizations already. “But, I am a newb. I don’t make any money writing. It’s not like I will have to tell my mom have no money because you did not show up to write.”
I got news for you. You cannot eat with those rationalization checks either.
Plus you also get paid by the work itself. When we work we set up a positive biofeedback loop, much like what an athlete does for training. After a session in the pool, the swimmer feels like a different person than the one who jumped in for laps an hour ago.
This pay is big. Motivates you to do more and get better. Releases tension from the biofeed back loop. Builds pride in your work. Pays the dues that mark you as a member paid in full. It also cuts the dread and misery out of your life while giving you a runner’s high without breaking a sweat.
Every day you finish your work, you join a not so secret fraternity that gives you the same kind of privileges usually left for Marines’ esprit de corps, the martial artist’s inner calm while walking the marital way, or the mother with the new born in her arms.
Pay in Pages
Above all you are left with one more very important paycheck. Another day’s pages down and closer to a finished and published project that may one day mark you as immortal.
No work means more than just no cash today. It also means you will never publish, so your financial world will not change because of your writing. It means the pay you do get from the positive biofeedback you get from the work itself does not show up either. Say good bye to the motivation you need to change the first pay problem while you get to feel miserable in so many other ways too.
We get paid by the work itself. Word for word. Pound for pound.verything you put in comes back to you in full. Even if no one else on the planet knows it, you get paid. Do the work. (Thank you Steven Pressfield for that little mantra gem.)
In Advance
Plan ahead. A writing cue stops the stall. Half the time we sit down and do not write. We suffer before the blank page staring back at us. The dang thing is defiant, even aggressive so it seems at time. You look and look. Nothing comes to mind.
One of the more professional tricks is to know now in advance what you are going to write on. This is nothing new. News papers have paid City editors for decades to come up with article ideas and plan for when and where to use them so the reporters do not have to do the hard work.
Many professional writers have used planning tools like the writing machine, the beat sheet, the foolscap method, and so on to crack out longer works like white papers, novels, plays, movie scripts and non- fiction books. Having a cue for what you are going to write helps end those questions of what to write. You have the clothes line done. Now sit and do the work of filling in the gaps.
Practice First
Practice the habit before you try to take it seriously. This seems to be a lesson many people never take seriously. In fact they discount it so much that they often never do it, yet it is a vital step in the process.
Every serious professional out there has spent time practicing their work. In the Marines we practiced those habits we would need in combat or to support that effort. On the dojo floor I practiced the skills I would need to walk the path of a Karnataka and swords man. Practice of skills is important, but you need to focus on the habit of those skills to make them automatic.
No Karatika or Marine would advise anyone to step into a fight without first having practiced enough to make the skills an automatic habit. The same advice is true in writing.
I have not always followed that advice for my own writing path. I spent years…couple of decades really, ignoring this key habit. It literally sat there before my eyes till I started to actually work on my habits directly. Then it hit me like a Seattle flying fish down at Pikes Street Market. How could I have missed this?
Be Resillient
The one thing that all humans are is resilient. We adapt and over come. Trust that inate ablity. You still might stall out because you are not ready to write the piece. You will only be ready when the work is done. So do exactly what our ancestors did to become top dog on this planet, adapt. You get ready by doing the work. Do the work. Look at the results. Adapt. Repeat.
Write Crapy
One of the hang ups I have seen in myself from time to time is that I want the work to be perfect. That’s not a bad thing, but no one, I mean no one writes perfect on the first go.
Even the stories around greats like Jack London prove this. London cracked out his immortal tale ‘Call of the Wild’ while stuck in Alaska over a few weeks. The manuscript was so perfect his editors could not really edit anything.
The fact remains that the editors saw the final copy London shipped to them, after he had fixed things. The first drat stuff stunk in places, was lost in others and was nothing short of a cry for help far more often than not. So what? It was a rough draft. It was supposed to stink.
Your first draft will too. Crack it out knowing it will be bad anyway. In fact give yourself permission to write as crappy as you can. You can and will re-write it later. It will get better. Your first step though is you to have the puzzle you are trying to figure out laid out with the sides all in place.
Parting Thoughts
Try a few of these. If they don’t work for you, don’t worry. They might not be the habits for you. There are plenty more. Just look for the habits that are blocking your way or just not there at all. Ask yourself what you need. Use that self-understanding to find the habits that will work for you. You just have to keep the one key habit of them all…be Resilient if you want to be self-disciplined. Be disciplined if you want to start your habit.
Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash