Patience Writer. It’s a mantra I use to remind myself in the middle of a project to relax and enjoy the trip. No skill is more needed by a writer than that of patience. It is not an easy one to learn. We often feel an urge to surge ahead so we rush ourselves only to slip and fall. We forget to keep our basics in play.
There are some helpful things we can do to develop more patience. It is a bitter pill to swallow but the results satisfy the soul. We are most fortunate that patience is a learnable skill.
Know your enemy…impatience.
Our world today is a breeding ground of impatience. We have such convince in everything from buying our clothes to getting a fast answer on Google. Instant gratification rules us all. The only cost our ability to deal with the realities time imposes on us.
Go on line or look at any media ad. What do we see? Ads and claims that we can achieve any goal in just a few minutes and with no other cost than the program, pill, or some secret. Do you really think you can actually “Lose 10 inches in 10 days”? If you do, will you be happy with the results? Have you considered your answer there? Is it limited? Did you think about what your next step might be to maintain them for that answer?
Such is the comeuppance of impatience. We often miss the entire picture just for one tidbit promise that is more often fleeting than not. The frequent cost is despair and more frustration.
The Writing! Get on with the Writing!!!!
Sounds somewhat familiar, doesn’t it? That’s the sound of my own inner voice when I want to get the point of my writing. I want to get to the meat of the matter right away. It’s a good thing that writing does not allow me that luxury. No one would understand what I am talking about without some kind of introduction and a general form to follow in the argument. Writing demands patience. I have my montra to remind me too. “Patience Writer.”
The fact is every writer is under attack, mostly from within, to write faster, write more and get published. We cannot wait to see our names in print or even see that direct deposit from our client. We want it all now.
The waiting is the hardest part.
One of the hardest things to do for a writer is to wait. We need to wait for a blog proposal to be accepted, a journal editor to accept our submission, or a book publisher to approve of our manuscript. It is not uncommon to hear a writer say they would rather have a quick no over a personalized rejection in a couple of months.
That kind of a mindset is almost a crime that will only slow the writer’s development over the long term. A personalized rejection like that will give the writer a better perspective on his piece and skills. Such honest evaluations are essential for real development as a writer. Skipping this for a lack of patience is a disservice to yourself.
I am not saying you should wait for everything. I am saying that you should be more grateful when you do wind up waiting at some point. You will not get some insightful answer every time, but those you do get can really improve your game. That gain is always worth the wait for a writer with patience.
Learn patience writer
Patience takes practice. Patient writing is not any different. That means you will need to let things mature as you go along. I have found a few things do help with developing patience. Yes there are small hacks you can do to move through the process. Not really speed things up, it’s more like what they taught us in the Marines for swimming. “Slow is fast in the water.” That’s because when we swim we fight the water and sink instead of just pushing our buoyant bodies forward.
Purposefully approach your work with the mindset that you are going to let the writing process outside your control is not your concern. Focus instead on consistent and regular writing habits that you can control. For instance getting your pages done today. Publishing your blog’s post or getting that spec article for the portfolio written and uploaded.
Distract yourself habits. One habit you can really use is to check your email just once or twice a day for a very limited time. This also applies to texting and social media as well. You do have people you want to hear from other than your client or publisher. When you limit your time looking for responses, you open more time to think about and do other things. For instance instead of worry over your newest submission, you could just move on to your next project. Ship and then get back to work and life. There are other things to do with your time than just wait for a response, even a fast one.
Be a Salesman.
Awhile back in college I worked schlepping vacuums cleaners door to door. I learned a lot in that time even though I did not really rack up large volumes of cash doing it. In fact I had a manager who was always killing my sales because he was focused on getting cash only deals while all the ones I could find were payment types. From his perspective it was a loosing deal because a cash deal was always paid immediately while the payment program required a waiting period for the commission to be paid and a replacement vacuums to be sent.
I complained of the situation to a more experienced salesman on the team who pointed out that sales was much like life. You had to get through all of the no’s to find the yes’s. “Always look for the no’s.” My boss was just focused on a different set of no’s than I was. In some ways he was more patient than I at the time. He knew the yes’s would come. He just had to get through all of the no’s first. To do that he needed people with stock on hand available to get those to those yes’s as fast as possible.
Writing rejection works the same way. If we waste our time or take too many stupid hacks trying to speed things up because we lack patience, then we lose the time to get the next project or work on said project with less than the total focus and skill we should. Either way we suffer more over all because we are waiting for responses instead of keeping our efforts moving forward.
Patience in writing is an active process. You get stronger the more patient you choose to become. To be patient you let the things you do not control do their thing and you become more focused on what you do. Write more. Read more. Practice. Allow yourself to fail, so that you can get up for more practice. Be active in your patience.
Enthusiasm discipline two writing strategies that work. They are great in fact. The trouble with all that enthusiasm starts with a burst of energy and good will but it does not have the staying power to keep a large project going beyond a day or two. It fizzles as the project becomes a slog. It is when you hit the slog that you find who has discipline and who does not. Of the two you need discipline more.
That’s not to say you don’t need enthusiasm. You do. Enthusiasm can get you off your duff and jumping out the door. It’s the starter. You need it, but it is different from discipline both in how you use it and how you fix it. All too often we confuse the two. Then wind up using the wrong solution for the problem. Today we will look at what both are.
Opposing Forces
Enthusiasm and discipline are not really opposing forces as writing strategies go. If anything they are the forces we use to create things and move mountains. We get a charge from our enthusiasm. It propels us forward to try. Discipline is our inner force to start and stay with a given task till it is done. They are really our why and how. Without both we will drop to the ground never to know what it means to fly.
How we use them.
Quite a few people miss the point that these two traits do in fact work together because they fail to see how they actually work or even which one they are dealing with. Some even think that one of them is not really all that necessary.
Two Stances
In my research I ran across an artist who sees discipline as inferior to enthusiasm. She went to such an extent that she suggested running away from anyone arguing that discipline is a needed element in any art’s tool kit, or any other creative for that matter be they writer, performer or business builder.
To be fair, I have seen some sources that see discipline alone as the only universal one size fits all tool you will need to get your work done. I really cannot blame a panicked artist for their take since there are many who focus on discipline sans enthusiasm.
Feedback Loop
There is a reason though for that focus on discipline. Discipline is about the only way to develop anyone to high enough level in a given filed that enthusiasm will have any real power for them. Humans gain enthusiasm for what they like, which more often than not is something they feel they are good at on some level. The reality is that discipline is reinforced by enthusiasm and in turn this provides a discipline feedback loop to the enthusiasm. We can see that loop in the form of the end results it provides.
More Enthusiasm
There are those who argue that enthusiasm rules over discipline because they think it will not get you very far. They tend to see self-discipline as joyless and cold. What they miss is that there are literally millions of enthusiastic people in the world who never write, draw, paint, sculpt, perform, or create anything. In fact they have more than enough joy and enthusiasm for the task, but they lack the control and direction that discipline brings to the table.
Disciplined Works
The disciplined artist or writer gets to their work regularly instead of spending time on Facebook, binge watching Netflix, spending time with the guys and gals at the bar a little too often, or any number of a million other distractions. While it’s true those enthusiastic folks love their work, the trouble is they don’t love it enough to discipline themselves to actually do the work. So they wind up puttering around with it on the weekends that lead to dozens of unfinished and never started projects. Discipline is what Steven King uses when he argues for the need to finish any given draft in a season.
Discipline Stands with Enthusiasm
This is not to say you should not love your work. In fact one of the most prolific writers of all time Isaac Asimov said you should love your work. He was right. Love of the work, enthusiasm, will drive your work. You need it.
Disciplined to Quit
However, Asimov like all writers had a problem with writing. At times his brain just did not give him all the answers he needed on a given piece of work. His solution was to be disciplined enough to know when to let the work go for a bit, then come back later when his mind had had the time to work things out.
The thing to remember here is that Asimov was highly disciplined. When he was stuck on a given project, he did not just walk away from writing completely. He planned for being stuck at times. That’s when he chose to work on another project that he did have solutions for till his mind could sort things out. This is the reason he had so many typewriters about his office and house, each all ready setup with its own work already in process. This is discipline taken to a very high standard.
Other Productive Writers
Asimov is not the only writer to use this kind of self-discipline. Many highly productive creative writers have multiple projects in play at any given time. That’s really why they are so productive. Multiple projects allow the writer to use our most valuable commodity of time with the greatest economy and outcome both in volume and quality. If you stop writing on a given project to give your subconscious time to work things out but lack the discipline to work on another idea that’s ready to go in your head, then while you may be freed to go cavort about in the hills, that story or article is going to have to wait till you get the stuff in front of it out.
That greatly decreases the chances of what might have proved a brilliant masterpiece ever seeing the light of day. It takes discipline to ensure that your valuable creation time is not wasted on sideline items that denies your inner artist their chance to create.
When they are just not clicking.
There are many times when you will not click with what you are doing. There are just two choices. You can slog till you break through or quit for a time to let the water settle a bit. Both can and do work, but the trick is you have to know when to do which.
To know which to choose you have to know if it is an enthusiasm problem or a discipline problem. The important thing to keep in mind here is that you are facing a problem, not some break in you or a sign you have no skill. Problems are a just problem, which means they also have solutions. Work the problem and you will find the solution, but first you have to ask what problem discipline or enthusiasm.
Frankly most people will be able to tell instinctively most of the time. But, there are times that your own biases will get in the way. In the end it is just about getting the balance of the feedback loop working again.
Find the Joy
For an enthusiasm problem it is a matter of getting in contact with our why or just giving the brain a chance to chill with all the ideas it had. You can do this with some journaling around the idea, working on something else, or just taking a walk among the trees. Either way you will be able to work through the problem and your words will flow again.
Move in the Grind
For those times when your gut says slog, go for it. In the Marines the most valuable skill that is taught is how to be miserable. We learn to love the grind because of it. We focus on the movement and the grind itself as we let the hump just slide under our feet. Motion is the answer. It takes away our ability to over think things. Over thinking is very much the reason why you see baseball players strike out while you almost never see a tennis player miss a ball. The secret sauce is the fact that the baseball player cannot move, but the tennis player can.
In fact movement ensures the results. Moving prevents the tennis plaer from focusing on hitting the ball and over thinking the process because they are focused on their feet. Meanwhile the major league baseball player can only think about hitting the ball. He cannot help but over think things. In fact he has time to think about a lot of things on the road to Yips land. Pitchers and catchers know this. That’s why pitchers take their time to throw and the catcher often talks smack to get in a batter’s head.
To Write is to Grind
Grinding works much the same way with writing as with a long hump. If you can remove your focus for what you are saying to something else, such as typing accurately, then you can get out of your own mind’s way and let the words flow where and how they come out.
Sometimes no amount of time away will fix the problem like slinging stuff left and right till you are just about blind. We grind then we can rest and go back to edit and cut with the same voracious appetite till we have a clearer idea of the piece we want. It’s much like sculpting clay. We build a general form then cut and smooth away the stuff that is not the shape we want.
Long Term Projects
Things get different when we look to optimize our enthusiasim and discipline for better and longer term performance. Short term hacks will work but over the long term you need a better strategy, one what will feed both your enthusiasm and strengthen your discipline.When you are working as a professional with a deadline with less than interesting material there are some ideas you can use to keep enthusiastic over the writing itself and not just the need for a paycheck. Though, that fact has been quite inspirational for many working writers for centuries. The key here is to make the work interesting. I have found that blogging gives up some great ideas that are useful for other forms of writing.
Look for new angles. Use a clever metaphor for the frame work or flip the advice to tell people how not to be successful.
Use some form of writing constraint for the piece. For instance refuse to use a given vowel or word in the piece. This will stretch you a bit and work the vocabulary.
Get really focused on the reader. Someone is going to read this. Make this bone dry stuff as clear and direct as possible for that person. Creating a clear and uncluttered work is the hallmark of a master writer.
A plan works better than hitting a blank wall.
You can avoid crashing to a great degree by creating your own set of habits and rituals that work around your over thinking mind. Five habits to have in play for your daily work are:
Build your work into your day.
For writing to work consistently it needs to be a part of your larger routine. That routine has to be geared to support your work with time as well as the physical, mental and emotional energy to do it. Much in the same way your daily system will get you to work on time and ready to work instead of being late and tired because you only got five hours of sleep, skipped breakfast and forgot to do your laundry this last week
Use a warm up routine.
Letting your brain know it’s time to work and possibly what you will be doing are two great ways to ease your way into a productive writing session. Here are some ideas to try.
Journal
Journal about what you are going to write on or create a mind dump of everything that pops into your head of things you need to do, have done or want to do right now. Either way primes and clears that mental deck.
Eat
Get some coffee or tea, maybe a light meal. A little food is good to get chugging, but keep it light. A heavy meal has the opposite effect.
Re-read Yesterday’s Work
Re-read what you wrote yesterday. A variation of this is to stop at the end of your writing day and take a moment to write down your next step or part you will write/edit/etc…The idea is to remind yourself where you are and what you need to work on so the mind can get to work when you come back.
Research Review
Review your research, beat sheet or foolscap outline. Spend some time thinking about your theme. This serves a double purpose since many writers don’t really know their themes till they are well into the writing process, sometimes not even then. More time spent working on the book will make will solve this problem and generate some ideas for what you do want to write.
Meditate
Meditation is also a great way to train the mind to focus while clearing the mental decks. It’s a great one two tool to get ready for today and to strengthen yourself for tomorrow.
Be prepared.
Know that your brain and life are going to play tricks on you to get you out of the chair. Don’t fall for it. Get your pages.
What is Writing?
Have a broader view of what writing is. A lot of people tend to think that all that you do to write is just put words on paper, or as Paul Gallico wrote:
“It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little…”–Confessions of a Story Writer 1946.
That’s a great metaphore, but not even close to the reality case. There several stages in writing. The least noticed are the preparation, the edit and rewriting stages.
Lore
The writing lore seems to leave people with the vision of some genius pounding keys and cranking out pages by the fist full. Even those writers like Jack London who wrote Call of the Wild in less than a month with such skill that the editors could not make any major changes to the manuscript still had to pass through the other unseen stages.
Reality
The reality is you need to have your homework done, read research, and at least an idea of what you are going to write to some degree before you sit-down. That can be as much as three read books and complete out line with character sketches or as little as a story outline from a classic book and the two main characters. Pressfield started with this for “The Legend of Bagger Vance”.
No matter where you are in the process, you have to start with an understanding of both where you are and what you need to do next.
What about just sitting down at the computer to pants it, but you are a total blank? Take a step back and asks what is this about? What am I missing? Go from there.
Timers are your friend.
Use a timer to write in short periods to help focus the mind, whetehr you know what you are going to write about or don’t. Most of the times I have used vary from five to twenty-five minutes. Training your mind to work in a limited time helps your mind sort through the crud faster and get to the point without much force of will power on your part. When the time is up you can take a break, take off for the day, or even start another round.
There is always a why, just ask.
What is the reason why what you are writing is hard? That is because it is hard or you don’t know something. Time to work the problem. You are not lazy or lacking discipline or have no willpower. It is just a problem to solve, so be nice to yourself and ask why you are struggling to get the words. Look for the real hang-up. You just might need to let things process or take a nap or maybe you really need to spend time with your spouse. Take care of those things then come back and hit it.
More Enthusiasm
You will also want to keep that enthusiasm up. Just like a plant you have to water it a little regularly. Here are some ideas on how to do that:
Play around a bit.
We tend to be most enthusiastic was children, so getting back in touch with that kid is going to have some positives for your personal energy levels.
You can daydream a bit about your child hood or your past in general when you were more child-like through your journals, photos, or even just your daydreams. The point is to connect with the feelings you had back then to be enthusiastic.
Interview yourself as if you are a book character. Ask about fears, loves, who they trust, who they don’t, etc…
Get off the couch and do something that moves you into your body. Build, craft, play games, roll around on the floor like you used to.
Gratitued Practice
Take some time to work through painful or repressed emotions and practice some gratitude. There’s a great meditation call the 6-Phase Meditation that used one of the phases to call to mind some slight you might still feel angry about and forgive it. Another phase calls for you to feel gratitude for things in your life. Processes like this are great for releasing those mental blocks and can aid writers clear their mental decks. Choosing to leave the pain behind while reinforcing the positives in our lives helps keep the mind balanced and relieves much of our daily stress.
Take a Nature Bath.
Studies have shown that reconnecting with the natural world around us grounds us. For many, including myself, much of our childhood was spent outdoors running around and playing. It is one of the key areas we connect with our inner joy and enthusiasm. Immersing ourselves in nature is as easy as taking a walk. The Japanese go so far as to recommend taking a Treebath, walk in a forest, regularly to cleanse the soul. Even some house plants and watching some nature shows help.
Spend Time with Success
Go look at some of your previous work or someone else’s work. Sometimes you forget that you have done things before. Reacquainting yourself with your younger self’s writings can remind you of what you are capable of. You can also take some time to read other people’s work too. A good story can fire the imagination. Use those memories and that to fire your own imagination.
Last Words
The thing to remember with discipline and enthusiasm is that they are not in opposition. They are very much dependent on each other to survive. If the words are just not coming, take some time to find out which is stuck and how best to move the two back into a supporting flow.
Start a Morning Writing Routine. One of the easiest times s to fit your writing into is first thing in the morning. Mornings tend to be the quietest and least filled chunks of time we have in our schedules
Mornings are also the time we have the most will power and energy to ensure that those things get done. This is critical when dealing with something that requires both new habits and your current habits prevent. Most people have effectively used mornings for a verity of improvements including working out, making the bed, or writing. Morning routines set us up for a much easier win with a very difficult goal. This is the prime reason so many experts praise using that time for getting things that are important done.
Writer’s Mornings
Since we are writers here, I am going to attack this from a writer’s perspective. Every writer is different and we have our own elements that we want in the routine. The main thing to remember is there is a way to go about setting yourself up so that at the end of the day your writing habit produces pages. If you set up a routine that does not produce pages, either directly from the practice or as a result of the practice, then you are making an error somewhere. Correct it. Anything in your routine must support and improve your writing.
This is a rough outline of my routine. The purpose is not to show you what I do so much as the process I use to build my mornings and the why I use each part. Some people will change things around or even eliminate things bases on their own lives and what works for them. That is totally fine. The point here is to see how we put together a routine that works and why it works.
Realistic Expectations
Two things to remember. One. If anything does not work for you, ignore it. Find what does. Two. Try some of the ideas that look like they will not work for a week or two. You might change your mind. Three. You are not married to your routine. Times change. You change. Things move in and out of your life. These life changes will change what you can fit in, when you want start your routine, and how you want to go about your routine. Do not think that you have to have the exact same routine for ever. You won’t. No one does really. Our routines are an ever adapting facet of life. It would be crazy to set unrealistic routines in play that do not match with your life and goals.
Set Routine Goals
That brings me to part one. Know what you want to achieve with your routine first. Since we are discussing writing, I am going to start with that. This same practice can also help setup an evening or afternoon writing period as well.
In my life I have had a lot of routines since my mother started packing me up for first grade. Over my child hood I tended to just fit whatever school needed into my mornings or what my mother told me to. I did not plan how to use my mornings. The closest I came was getting up at six in the morning to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Even that was not very complicated.
In high school I just added some hint for a time, then later dropped it. Most did not last very long. The longest was a quick set of push ups and squats in the morning because a coach said I was a good idea. I dropped it when I hit college to swim laps, then I had an early class and changed it to riding my bike to class, dropped it to walk to a part time job, and so on… This was not really planning my morning so much as just responding to what the world threw at me.
Planning
When we plan our mornings we choose specific goals that the mornings set us up to attain. We set those specific goals up because they are important to us, not just what sounds like a good idea or is the requirement for the environment we are in. For instance in the Marines we had the morning habit of PT every day, but it was more the result of a need for able bodied Marines in combat by the Corps rather than a conscious choice of anyone. Any benefits for us was purely a bonus.
Concious Commitment
A writer wants to make a conscious commitment to their work. That’s why we have to know our why as we go about the process. The first step is to decide what you want out of your mornings. Some questions to start.
Are you running a blog?
Then you are likely looking to get an article up regularly. The frequency of those articles will change how much time you will need to write your posts. You also need to consider time down for rewriting and the back end work like keywords.
Are you a novelist?
Ask when is your deadline for your rough draft or the final draft with the editor? Are you doing some of your research as part of your writing? Your world is different than a blogger. Your form is longer and your deadlines are too. Where as some bloggers might crank out a thousand complete words a day and publish immediately, most novelists don’t do that. I don’t even think Asimov at his fastest did that. So while a blogger can easily set up a productive routine that covers all the process every day, a novelist’s days can change a lot more often.
A caveat to that is something similar to what I do. I just write my rough drafts first thing in the mornings and do all the prep work, editing and rewrites at other times. This works for me. Your methodology is going to be different.
Are you a copywriter?
How many words do you need to crank out this month? What are your client deadlines? What types of copy are you doing? Do you write all of your stuff between 9 am and 5 pm in an office? Your morning routine will likely be more aimed at clearing your mind for the day and energizing the body in preparation for the slog ahead of you instead of cracking out words.
Every writer will have some different uses for the time. The great thing about every well developed morning routine is that they help every writer write better.
How I Flow
Once you have consciously chosen your aim, it’s time to look at what a morning routine can look like.
Countdown Launch
A morning countdown starts my morning routine from pillow. I picked this up some time ago to beat the urge to hit the snooze button. It works. No routine, no matter how amazing is going to do anything if you are not out of bed with enough time to do it. Counting down does that.
The countdown is simple. When your eyes open count down from five to zero. On zero, I substitute the word ‘launch’ for a little mental boost, jump out of bed, plant your feet shoulder width apart and throw your fists into the air as you say aloud, this can be softer to not awaken anyone still sleeping, “This is going to be a great day.” Even if you don’t feel all that great set your your mind toward the positive. It will give you a little more resiliency. If I am still a little sluggish when I makeup I do roll up out of bed instead of a jump but I still stand up immediately, plant my feet with a little jump at the end.
The reason why I do this is because if you can get your feet on the floor, you are less inclined to lie back down in bed than you would if you were sitting up or worse still lying in bed. Yes there will be days you do not want to get up or you dawdle. Slow is fine. The point is to advance far enough that returning to bed is not really an option for you.
There is also something about landing on your feet first thing and standing in this power pose that really helps move the energy levels up.
Move and Clean
Next up is a short period of physical movement and a short hygiene routine. The PT is a short 10 to 20 minute plan. I have used quite a few different approaches from burpees to kettlebells. I tend to hedge on the minimalist side. The programs I have used over the years included the Royal Canadian 5-BX program to the Tibetan Rites. The point is to do some exercise that gets the blood moving. Also, I prefer also to keep the noise to a minimum as well since I am working out at the foot of the bed and do not want to wake my wife.
Hygeen
Once the sweat hits, I need a shower and this is a perfect time to get a cold shower and to brush my teeth. The cold water clears the salt and sweat off and brings up the energy factor a little more. Brushing your teeth is another energy booster that stimulates your gums. I can attest this is like drinking cup of coffee on the alertness scale.
Make Bed
By this time my wife is up for her routine, so I make the bed as I get dressed. That means button down shirts and jeans or Dockers, because I am telling my mind that I am shifting to writing mode. I want a more professional mindset than PJs or workout gear might provide. I allow myself a little free spirit mode because I stay barefooted. It’s morning time not office time. I want creativity. Shoes are for office hours. Again I am playing with my mind and ramping it in a given direction. I want to be more of a pantser type writer here rather than a plotter.
To the Desk
On the way to my desk, I grab some water or even a cup of black coffee. Hydration is one of the most missed elements in the morning. Our bodies are mostly water and you dehydrate while sleeping. More so if you are like me and have worked out or gotten a quick walk in. You think better with water than without. In the Marines we chugged a full quart first thing before chow. Water does wake you up, helps you think and even helps prevent nasty issues like heat stroke.
Clean Thinking
The first thing I do when I sit down is clear my head with some stream conscious writing. I write out my Morning Pages. In general we are talking three handwritten pages of whatever comes to mind. This includes anything from your day’s work to your mind wondering when will this thing end. I put it all down. The purpose is to get the mindless chatter out of my head so I can focus for the writing ahead and for the rest of the day. I even find some really good ideas pop up too.
Writing Mode
Now I shift into writing mode. I grab a little writing motivation and direction, I use Steven Pressfield’s writing books for this. The chapters are like a page long but they always get me in the mood to write. After, I say my writer’s invocation which is the opening of Homer’s Odyssey that I got from Pressfield and set my timer for 25 minutes. This tell my higher mind that it is show time. I get to work.
I write across several different areas ad copy, blogs, and fiction. My first session of the day is always what ever novel I am working on. I write like I did in high school long hand in black Bic Crystal ink and a spiral notebook.
Writing Results
Again all of the process is aimed at getting as much done as possible in a short time. I act with the idea that things like the muse will show up because I am there. The timer limits the amount of time I have and forces my mind to think rather than stall. I use the pen and paper because it reminds me of the happiness I had in school scribbling short stories and the crazy project I thought of as my novel. I use everything I can think of to get the words on the page…no waiting. Also, NO editing, corrections, or changes of any kind. What I put down stays like watercolor painting. Additions only make a mess. Leave it move on. This is all rough draft time. I just get what comes to me down. Editing is for later.
Writing For Reps
Depending on the amount of time I have, I might do one or two more sessions, but I always get up and walk about for a few minutes to just let the mind have a break.
Just Walk Away
After I get the words down, I walk away. I do not try to immediately fix anything. I let the material settle and percolate a bit. Allowing my mind to work deeper saves much grief. I don’t work with the material I have written till at least later in the day. I prefer to let it build longer though, like three or so days before I look at it again.
As for writing in general I use the same method to walk away in my other writing too. It works. Skipping it entirely is also a big mistake. No one should ever skip a second look. The main thing is to not do it too soon. Both editing immediately or skipping straight to publishing are just recopies for disaster.
Coming back to the rough will bring more work, one or ten rewrites lay ahead, but shaping it is far easier since you will likely be using the best stuff you mind could come up with. That’s for later. Now my pages and my morning routine are done.
Morning Done
There you go. My basic morning flow routine. Now it’s your turn. Choose the parts that work for you. Add what you think works for you. Go for a morning walk instead of a workout or skip it if you warm up better just jumping to the writing itself first thing cup of coffee or tea in hand. The point is to choose what you will do on your terms in your way with purpose. You morning routine should have a purposeful intention behind it.
Last point
A morning routine is meant to remove stress and add to our lives. It should simplify how you achieve what you do while it allows you, your higher self, to come through on the pages. Taking charge of your mornings and your craft first thing in the day is one of the best things you can do for your writing.
Leadership praise first. I first came across that idea in the Marines. It’s a solid way to deal with issues. Recently I’ve been working through Chet Scott’s Becoming Built To Lead and found the same idea. I’ve found Scott’s book to be a journey in a book that provides you with daily lessons in discipline to guide your path to mastering the art of living. I just chanced to find it while looking for a good book on self-leadership. This book has not been a disappointment. I could use a lot more work on myself. It is one of the better tools I have run across. Scott is quick to point out “I am a work in progress.” He has a wonderful way of showing one where to look to find where you need to work. I recently reached Scotts lesson on self-talk came with a bit of a twist. He summed the entire talk up in one word…Praise.
Praise
Scott sees praise as one of those things we both greatly crave. Yet, all too often we are sadly lacking any kind of praise from the most important source to us all. We all love the praise we get from our leaders, coaches and team mates when we are in the thick of it in training or on the field. We drink in the praise we get from friends and family as we go about our lives.
The trouble is that we don’t really have these folk there often. None of those folks are present with us when we actually do our best work or need some praise when we need a boost. Most of the time we work out there all alone.
Even if they are there, we are doing good if they just say ‘good job out there’ much less notice enough to give us some feedback at the end or aid us to build our confidence. That’s not that they are ignoring us. Everyone can be distracted. It takes very little for that something else to totally overwhem our awareness so that we miss the event.
Sad as it is, it is not?
The most important mental element in our effort to build confidence and strength of character is praise. All too often we get wrapped up in the big wins and the need for praise in those times. It tends to be the only thing we think about for both ourselves and those we are supposed to support. Though, we remember to do it with babies.
Praise the First Steps
How many people make time to praise their children when they take their first steps or learn to roll over? It’s virtually a universal sport. Yet once we advance beyond those years we forget that the little wins that are still so important for our own and those we lead’s development. The most important time to praise is found in the baby steps. With the major wins is fantastic but the little wins happen far more often than a major win or performance. Many more moments to get the confidence and strength building praise in. Remember going slow is a really good thing.
Good Leaders Praise
A good leader gets the praise in early and often. Praise for good work is the big thing that is remembered. That’s the essential job of any leader. But what of ourselves? The one witness to all of our wins and losses is us. We see it all. Yet, our own voice is not there to speak up. We are more often inclined to let our minds replay our film real of misses than speak of how we gave our best job. Real criticism can be good, but to be good it has to be aimed more for what will make us better, not ruthlessly critical and destructive. Honesty is a just act. If you did not get your heart into the game, admit it, but find out what is off that you need to fix too. Then fix that. First though praise what you did right.
Inner Voice
It’s the inner voice that we hear the most often when we perform. We hear it first and last. We need to remember to praise ourselves for the hard work in the moment when we do well, to know that we have done our best. The thing to keep in mind is the best praise comes from our performance itself. It’s a biofeedback loop rewards us for having done the work.
This is why the work itself is its own reward. We get back what we put in. Even a poor performance is still a performance. You will get something back for the work itself.
Look for the wins first. Find it. Celebrate that little win, even if it is just the fact that you showed up and hung in the game for another day. Take it. It’s a win. We can always find the time to evaluate the work for improvement later.
Praise then constructive criticism
One thing that has occurred to me that every coach, leader, parent, friend, and of course ourselves should have in play is the order of praise and criticism. In the Marines leaders always praise first, then criticize. In many cases it also best to leave the criticism for later when you can better judge the call without so much of the emotion and adrenaline running through everyone’s veins. We should remember to do that to ourselves the most.
Saving your criticism for later is one way to help the biofeedback do it’s job to build your confidence and feed your soul first. A bit of time allows you to gain more from a constructive look at the problems instead of just ripping through yourself in the anger of the moment. If you need it, schedule your criticism for later and keep the meeting with yourself, but focus on the wins. This has proven the best way I know of to keep that biofeedback loop working.
Inside Leadership
Our internal ledership is the most essential tool. I have found we get our personal biofeedback loop off line because we look to outside leadership instead of the internal leader within. That leaves us withou leadership more often than not. When we do turn on our internal voice we are too critical when we should be more celebratory. Remember there is a time to celebrate and build up. That time is for the performance.
My Take
In the end it is our self-praise that is most important for our confidence and our level headed self-evaluations guide us the best without the flow of emotions. The point is to not put the two together or in the wrong times. Praise in the win, especially the small ones. Plan a time to be critical of your performance after the emotions are gone and you can see it more clearly to make better calls on what you need to do. You will be a fairer judge of things and fix more.
The bottom line is praise. It is often the forgotten element.
Clean thinking your writer’s calendar? Is that even possible?
I have seen hectic days and totally boring days. There are different kinds of problems with both. In the end both kinds of days reach the same conclusion. You windup producing very little, if you get anything productive done at all.
There is a solution for this. Clean up your calendar. Easier said than done. Far more needs to go into this than just some cutting here and there. Getting your calendar to the point there is a clear and concise focus to your days is not easy. I still work at this and am still learning. So take your time. Work in small chunks to implement your ideas.
Good thing that my first step is to:
Evaluate where you are now
Seems too simple, but almost every organizational thought process I have ever come across that has worked has started with this first step. You have to know where you are. Knowing that helps you figure out what to move around, limit, or cut.
There are two parts to this first step.
1. Know your values
Values will give you a campus to work from. This part is all about asking what is it you want, what do you believe, what are your goals, and what are the whys for it all.
If this sounds like a lot it is. The fact is you are either going to shape up your thinking for what you want, believe and value or you are going to find your calendar filled with what everyone else wants. Then you get to continue to bounce along for the ride as your time continues to control you. Locking down your own thinking gives you control.
Your control comes give you the ablity to use the one key word that everyone, especially a writer or any other creative type, should be able to use easily, painlessly and even joyously…No.
This most essential word allows writers the time and peace of mind to get the thoughts in (research), processed (mental thinking space) and out through the rampant typing and editing of words. To be followed by publication, delivery or Ship It!
2. Inventory your schedule, both written and unwritten.
We are now going to move to a spreadsheet, calendar, paper or your cell planner. If you have been working from any calendar instead of winging it, you already have some data, which will help. But everyone should go through and list out exactly how their time has been spent in the last week or two.
You can just rely on memory here to jump start your data if you don’t have any, but everyone should still take the next week or two to collect fresh data on how you are actually using your day now. The rules are simple. Write down everything you do and the time you spend on it.
There are also some…
Watch out for anything you do while you are supposed to be doing something else. Note what it is and about how long it took to deal with it. This step exposes unscheduled problems, time wasters, focus issues, and so on. Knowing what is slowing down your work is a good way to find good solutions for the problems.
For instance, you are supposed to be doing your financial books for about two hours. But you find that you got distracted by the kids checking their homework, YouTube had a great video for the historic period you are writing on, and you got hungry so had some homemade cookies that you whipped up. Not really a surprise that your three hour project got turned into six and you are still only half way done now?
Watch you non-scheduled use…
One of the biggest things to cover when you are working through this process is to make notes of what you are using your nonscheduled time for too. You are not just going to find things you might want to cut down on or eliminate. For instance cutting the time you are binging The Floor is Lava Season Two for the fifth time in three weeks. You will also find other things you want to keep, such as horror movie with homemade desert night with your daughter and son.
Scheduling is about adding to your life’s quality, not just taking things out.
Step Two: Purge to create more space.
For this step you have to know importance and urgency. Your values are going to tell you this. You are always going to have a mix of both in life, but we can make sure the less important things in life are not allowed to drown out the more important and valuable things. If you are a writer then we are talking writing, family, care of self, income (likely not to be writing at the start) and other things. These things bounce around a bit thanks to urgency.
Now look through the data you have. Look for things provide no value to you or anyone important in your life. Ask yourself questions about the time usages and the tasks themselves.
Am I doing things that no one uses? Can I outsource this? Can I skip this? Does this have to be done every week on Monday or can I cut that back to once every six months or even delete it entirely? Is this duplicating my work over here? Can bunch all these tasks in one block of time?
Everything that can be purged is purged. Start with reoccurring meetings and repetitive tasks to get some momentum. No regrets.
Now we prioritized and reorganize.
Look at how your work is done. Block your work into time chunks so you can work on like items in batches. That would be like writing up all three of your blog posts for next week over six hours on Monday. Doing all your calls for an hour in the early afternoon. The goal is to eliminate bouncing around in your mind from focus to focus. You do not want to multi-task in these chunks.
Prioritize your work according to its value for you, realistic requirements on your time and the level of urgency for the work.
Cuts
Work to remove any excess time padding you use to cover your projects. Work seems to expand to fill any extra time we give it. Set earlier deadlines and work to meet or beat them. Don’t stress out if you don’t initially see a large change. Give it some time. You will see how much you might be over or under estimating the amount of time you need. The trick here is to beat the clock not fill the schedule. Do only that. Over time you will increase your level of efficiency and likely raise your work’s quality as well.
Outsource
Outsource or automate where ever you can to improve your position not to just cut time. Sometimes outsourcing or automation is not a good idea. You will need to look at the pros and cons. In general if you can save time for something more productive, save what it would cost you to do it, or better align you with your compus values, then there is a good chance it is a good fit. Otherwise, be cautious. You might be just trading work for more work or worse paying to do more work.
Your goal is to free up white space on the calendar so that your daily schedule is flexible enough for the inevitable fires happen while maintaining productivity without sacrificing things like personal time or your peace of mind.
That leads me to the last step.
Make sure you write in down time. Clear thinking with your calendar is not just about getting work done. It’s about how you spend your time. You want a life, not a work. Give yourself time with yourself, space for those you love, and room for the things you want to do. Like heading on to your next project…Finish Your Long Project In 11 Steps
Mind dump practices clear mental clutter. If your are in doubt, have you ever sat at your desk to find your mind is so full of ideas yet none of them have anything to do with the work you are trying to scribble down?
Maybe you are eighty pages deep into your project or you are less than ten from done when your mind is flooded with thoughts for house projects that need to be done, worry over finances or some issue within the family that needs to be ironed out. How about all those day job issues…?
Even small stuff like going over your to do list or getting done so you can go to the movies with the family tonight can loom large before your eyes. The distractions are everywhere and many have merit or not. That matters little since they are destroying your writing time with the certaintude of a nuclear strike.
So many things buzzing around in our heads tend to exhaust every ounce of energy you have while it crashes your project and wrecks your sanity at the same time.
Living with so much clutter in our heads tends to leave us all tired, stressed, and antsy…maybe even thinking about quitting for a nice easy calm job like test pilot or explosives expert.
We all go there from time to time because you just can not turn off the thinking machine that is your brain. It will not focus. You cannot change that. Or can you?
Steve’s “Clean Thinking”
Some time ago I ran across Steve Job’s idea to declutter your mind by “…work hard to get your thinking clean…”. Steve spent a great deal of his time looking at how to simplify things for better results, and thinking clean was one way he achieved those results.
That is a brilliant concept. When we think clean we stop over thinking simple things. Less time spent thinking in clouded circles means more time taking through the steps in a more direct course to our solutions. Taking more steps forward like this has enabled me to get more done with far less frustration and far more motivation. I am certain it can help you as well.
Set your tools at your finger tips to help clear your mental clutter
The old saw says that it is better to act than think too much. Steve believed the best process for that was to dump our thoughts down on paper. You only need a pen and paper, but I have also used Notepad to type through this process. The tool is not as important as getting things out of your head.
The process is simple. Write down everything you are thinking right now. The size or importance, whether it is a problem or a goal, silly or smart does not matter. You just want it out of your head. Get it down. Do not try to edit or change things. Go as fast as possible.
Avoiding the urge to correct things instantly is likely why some people like to use pen and paper for this. This is one strong reason to do it that way, but it’s also the reason I use Notepad instead or word processing programs like Word and Grammarly. I shun auto correction and live time error marking. The point here is to avoid correcting myself and just flow with it. I kick that inner critic, perfectionist and sensor to the curb.
The only rule here is whatever is in your head, get it out.
No waiting here, just write everything down that comes to mind for a limited time, like five to fifteen minutes or even say thirty minutes for larger practices like Morning Pages. You can also use a given number of pages. Three pages seems to be the max value. More than that tends to make you too self-engrossed. With the head cleared, we can we set to work on the project itself.
Many times I have found a solution in the mind dump process itself that I had not really considered before. Most of the time I don’t. That’s fine. Getting the answer in the Mind Dump is just a bonus. I am still more mentally clear and capable of focusing on just the project at hand instead of wasting so much time with other things. My focus is on the shot here and now.
Another way to go about this process is to make it in to a part of your dayly flow. Just before I get to work, I take about five minutes to scribble out the thoughts in my head. I also use the concept as a separate practice first thing with morning pages. The tool is adaptable. Choose what works for you. Run with it.
Problem meet solution
So, if all you have to do is just dump it, then what is the problem of stopping there? Often scale is the problem, so too is the fact that like all tools one size does not fill the bill for everything or everyone. That’s where journaling comes in. It gives you another tool to work with.
Our thoughts are like dust build up in our minds. We tend to collect a lot of them daily. If we do not do something with them they will float about in our heads till we fall to their charms or we do something about them. If we want to really focus, we have to clear some mental space to get in the zone. That means we need to deal with the head clutter, the office clutter and the calendar clutter in our lives.
Journaling Clutter
Psychotherapist Carolyn Koehnline uses journal therapy to clear out our clouded thinking. She defines clutter as :
“…any object, emotion, or commitment that drains energy or distracts us from priorities.” To deal with those issues she argues we need to “Make decluttering a transformational act“.
Physical Clutter
Objects themselves are the physical clutter we can easily see but do nothing with. They fill our space from basement to attic with manifestations of decisions or experiences we want to avoid. They create an internal conflict that can be anything from left over work reminders to relationship or grief issues. Koehnline’s solution is to make decluttering a joyful, sacred process. Her advice is to:
1. Use a Human Perspective
Make your objective meaningful in more human terms than just being free of the buildup. For instance spending time with your family or getting that book written and published. See the results in terms of how it will hold meaning and value to you.
2. Positive Focus
While working through the stacks of stuff, keep your thoughts more positive. Avoid the negative issues. Instead, when your energy slackens, remind yourself of your objectives. Use your journal for this if you like. We all need to be reminded that we are working to grow the space in our lives. Bigger picture thinking is very helpful in this process.
3. Pace is everything.
Like any long distance effort from running the 200 mile Dragon’s Back Race to running a blog, it’s easy to fall prey to weaker thinking in the process. Our thoughts pressing that we should be further ahead or that with this form we will never make it. The mental hack is to set a pace and trust it to carry you through to the end.
Your journal entries are a great useful tool for this. Those entries will remind you just how many miles you have already logged, where you are going and, likely are what you need the most at times useful road markers like where your next break is coming. Write in the small goals that can be checked off as completed.
4. Celebrate the large and small wins.
The small wins are hightly important to remember since they are more frequent than the big ones, so they are more useful for keeping our moral up. They also provide the feedback mile markers we all need to see our major project through.
My Thoughts
I use these tools regularly. They allow me to use a one two punch for where I am at at any given point. Clean thinking in a mind dump before my work day or when I need to refocus on a project is highly useful for getting to work and coming up with better ideas regularly. My moreing pages tend to get me through the run without as much slog or energy drain. Some journaling works me though my ideas in a different way than either of the other two. It saves my bacon when I need validation and fixes some feedback issues for me. It is also a great tool to think things through when I am stuck. More to the point. The day’s work gets done and I feel good about it. Give clean thinking a try.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
