Feedback Response is Important. Good feedback is like manna from heaven. Poor feedback can kills gains and even end your writing career before it even starts.
I like working through leadership books. I got hooked on the idea by my karate Sensei. Later the Marines hammered the concept of learning more about leadership. Today, I keep on learning for the main reason that everyone is a leader.
Always Leading
Humans are leading all the time. We lead in our social groups. Sometimes we lead as a member of a team we work with. At home it is our family or among our friends when we hang out. We are even leading people we do not know by our example as we go about our days. However, the most forgotten leadership position is that we are also leading ourselves. That is the one position we do all the time. It is by far our greatest responsibility. We screw up that and we send ourselves and the rest down the same rat hole. Our only tool is feedback. How we respond to that feedback is important.
That’s part of the reason I have been spending some of my mornings this year working through Chet Scott’s 365 day long training book Becoming Built to Lead. I really like his dive in approach of sound advice focused on building your internal base by learning about yourself from you as you work to improve your leadership skills over the course of the year. He has some great feedback in those lessons, like a walking version of Kipling’s If The correct response should be to see the importance of what he is talking about. Then apply it.
Lessons From Scott
Today’s little slowdown period started out talking about Lionel Messi of the Paris Saint-Germaine soccer team. It would be fair to say I am a distance from being the greatest soccer fan. I watch the occasional game, like when the Italians play the Germans. My knoledge is just enough to keep up with the game and appreciate much of the skill the players have. I even know of some of the better players. Though, you don’t need even that much to agree with Scott’s belief that Messi is a master of his game. Anyone watching can see that on the field Messi is in his element. He has mastered the game to an amazing level of play. Just watch him play and pay attention to how hard they have to work when he has the ball. The story is written in their faces.
The interesting thing is, as Scott points out, that he is very dominate on his left foot. He is not really the balanced player many people might think a player of his level would be. In fact his right foot is not all that good. This is for most players a distinct disadvantage. It’s not really a secret either. Everyone knows this, not just on his team but all the other teams as well. This does not stop him from playing so well. His strategy is to just focus on brining his natural dominance to an even greater level of play. He raises the bar to such a level that even with such insider understanding no one can touch him. He is proof that you do not need to be totally rounded in everything to master your work. Instead choose to become extraordinary.
Put It In Play
So, how do you become an extraordinary writer?
The answer for Scott is found in the feedback we get from our work. You need feedback and running from it is not an option. You should be running to it. Absorb all the feedback. Drink it deep.
Though, here’s the first key point….only learn from 1% of everything you take in. Let the rest just flow through you. None of that stuff is worth your time because it really does not have an effect on what matters. What matters is the work itself. That’s where you get your answers. That’s where we need to focus. We are focusing on what feedback improves your work.
The important point in feedback is how we respond
You have to ask the hard questions. Does the feedback even apply? Will it produce real improvements? That one two combo knocks out much unneeded information and clears your mental decks to really use the remaining feedback effectively. We all need feedback that strengthens our work. We can and should ignore the feedback imposters that stroke our egos like approval and popularity. So too, the negative side of the coin gets the bin. Focus instead on doing the work and your mastery of that work. As Steven Pressfield points out you find the payoff in the work. You don’t find it in the emotions about your work. Your pay off is the joy of the job itself. The payoff is better when you used the right feedback to make your work stronger.
Writer traits support every writer known. Without them very little if anything would be written. The most basic writer’s trait is that you write. If you want to be a better writer you write then re-write. If you want to go further to professional then you add in a professional mind set.
There are literally hundreds of traits for each phase along the path that writers travel in life. My experience is different from others but from where I stand now after having written and not written over the years these are the traits that come most to mind for every writer to at least consider adding if not growing in his skill base.
Kaizen
The Japanese have an excellent word for a process that Ford came up with over a century ago. Kaizen is the process of constantly improving what you are doing for the better. We are not talking change for its own sake, rather the work to make things and processes better. No system or method is perfect. Writers have to work to find the things that can be improved to make things work better.
Writers have many things to work on beyond the work itself. They also work to improve their own inner character traits to support and grow their practice, develop their thinking skills, become more resilient and adaptable, improve the systems by which they get things done, increase their contacts in the writing sphere, etc.. There is a lot of work that goes into being a writer, not all of it is just a simple scribble on a page. Taking the time to think about what you need to improve and what to do about it is a great trait for a writer.
Patience
We all get caught up with a lack of patience from time to time. No one likes becoming patient. We just like the advantages when we are. Writers’ labor in a craft that takes time for everything, including down time between drafts just to get the head cleared around things. Being patient is a key writer’s trait for coming back to a project or given point when you have given it the time for things to line up. Patience is the best friend you will have while you slog it through.
Long Haul Perspective
Looking down the road is one thing, but actually accepting it and the daily grind to get there is another. This is likely the one thing that kills so many writers time and again. We just cannot accept the realities of the road ahead. All writers want our work done and a nice paycheck. It is hard to accept that we are going to actually have to walk every step of the process to get there. Changing that mental reference changes the entire game.
When we understand the game is going to be long, we can do things other than try to sprint through things or just walk away. We can sit down and work out a plan and strategy for actually getting there. Our work becomes more focused. We become more resilient when we hit bumps, our current limits, time constraints and painful evaluations along the way. We learn new skills like how to break our projects down into planning, research, writing, editing, re-writing, and publishing or delivery phases. Accepting the full scale of the work, much of it far from the glory we have in our minds and much more painful, is a powerful comfort when the winter winds blow and your life everywhere goes off into the deep.
Only one shot
There is a constant I have seen in several of the disciplines I have learned from over the years. Be it water color painting, sword drawing, riflery or writing the key is always to let your focus go to just one point then keep it there till the work is done and let it go to move to the next. No thoughts of the future. No worries of the past. Just stay in this instant and do the work.
This is not to say you should keep pounding away on a project that is stumping you or is in need of a break to let things settle. There are times and jobs where the mission of the day is to just slog one boot in front of the other till the journey is done. You will need to break from them. That’s why so many writers have multiple projects going at any given time. From Isaac Asimov to Steven Pressfield, I have seen the successful writers recommend that when you are stumped with a given project, move to another project till the mist clears and you can hit it again.
Time–it’s important
You will not live forever. You are going to die. For the writer, or anyone else who wants to achieve something, there is no clearer message that your time is valuable. The thing is most people treat time as the least important thing on their list. The writer cannot think this way. You will not get back one second that you spend…ever. You have no idea how many you have left either. A writer must use their time wisely or find themselves at some point looking their body of work lacking to their own wishes.
The best treatment I have found for this lies in two facts. One is a commitment to write daily. The second is locked writing office hours. I have found that having a morning that includes a solid writing practice for my novels has provided the anchor I needed to keep me on the path and expand that path to include time for more professional work in other fields like blogging and copy writing. You do not have to write books. You can blog or provide blog content or any other kind of writing you wish. The key here is to anchor yourself and your time with a set schedule for your writing whatever that is.
Gotta be stubborn
The one luxury you can ill afford as a writer is to quit. You just cannot do that. No quit in you. That means getting back up every time you fall. When you start to grind down you turn ornery. You slog. Steven Pressfield says it best, “Stay stubborn.”
Be Hungry
Les Brown is famous for saying that “You gotta be hungry.” He’s right. Nothing replaces the fuel of being hungry when working to your goals. Hunger is great. It narrows your focus and clears the excesses from your mind. Hunger even lights the path you need to travel today. Things become very simple when you let your hunger do its thing.
Every trait in this list can be learned, practiced and grown over time. The first step is to choose to work on them and commit to the process, then start working through the hard questions like: How do I do that? Then answer it. If you can’t think of how you can do it now, research it. That’s what Google and the library are for. You will find some answers easy and others hard. Some you will love others you will hate. Deal with them as they come and most importantly, write.
If you liked that, try a look at what Thinking Clear can do for you.
Writing Commitment writing goal. What are they? A goal is what toward go toward. Goals are one of the first great needs when you start writing. Have you made your goal? Can you ship your work? Goals inspire you to keep making progress. They are an essential part of the process.
Commitment is different. It is a pledge to yourself and your work that binds you to making a consistent effort. It is the obligation to walk the path over the long haul. You are there sunshine or rain or snow. The committed writer sucks up the misery, at times so much like a marine marching on the Bataan death march. Comfort and joy are secondary. It is the misery that you learn to enjoy.
Essentially your writing commitment and your writing goal are essentially the your writing journey and your arrival at the end of that journey.
Commitment for writing
Change your mind and commit, that’s what it’s all about. The armature will go off on flights of fancy. He will find things to do that are not writing. In the end he will find himself held back from the success he so badly desires because of those choices. His goals will remain far from his grasp till he owns up and pros up.
Committed writers reinforce their writing with a loyal daily effort. They move their work forward regardless of the reasoning of their fertile brains might come up with. Some of those issues are going to be right. In all reality most of them can be true. You might have to work at a day job. The spouse might want some time together. Your kids do need to make it to school on time. A writing commitment compels us to find those habits that are holding us back. We eliminate them to liberate ourselves with new habits and routines that grow our discipline.
Commitment Everywhere
I have found that commitment has often popped up in my life in areas without even my really knowing it was there. My black belt in GoJu Ryu Karate Do took me five years fo training. My wife and I have been married for over 27 years, after proposing in less than three months. I joined the Marines, found friends and a path that strengthened my life all the way to a full honorable discharge.
I have spent most of my adult life treating my writing like an anmature. It was the hobby that I told myself was my career path. Though, since I picked it up in high school I tended to treat it as a side line to something else. I planned to write in high school, even knocked out a novel rough draft over two years.
Though, the plan was to write on the side of another career. I have had sever of those over the years but I have kept on writing in many ways from small news papers to journals to a hundred starts on various novels to over eight/ several failed/ small blogs that never seemed to grow to dozens of other attempts.
Tying It Together
The most unifying part? Commitment issues. I did not really attack the underlying issue till I read Steven Pressfield’s War of Art, even then the book sat on my shelf after the first read for several years till I finally committed enough to decide to read it again. It was then that I made the commitment to read a chapter a day (Pressfield wrote in one to two page bites for the most part) that I started to change my mindset. I started to, in his words, “Turn pro” and “Do the work”.
It was only when I committed to finishing a book I had re-started several times over seven and a half years that I found the staying power. I had just 40 pages and an outline to start. The moment I commited I found the attitued to slog in with the attitude to writing every day.
Along the way I picked up several skills that keep me writeing every day. By far, the most useful habit has been commitment for getting my work written. It took two years to even then to get a solid rough draft.
The thing is it was after all that time I was in for a shock. I found the single book I had been slogging through was over 400k large, far more suited to a trilogy. The main victory was the finished manuscripts. I am still working on the edit. The drafts would not have reached the level they did without commitment.
Why Writing Needs Commitment
Commitment is the only way you are going to bust through your mental blocks. I have found there are seven things writers need to commit to when we commit ourselves to being a writer.
Time
The first thing that writing demands is your time. No one creates without the use of time. If you want to write, you have to commit the time to do it or something else will drain that from you. It is all too easy to let life choose for you instead of following up on your commitment.
The key here is to set a time you will write and keep that appointment. At the start, the habit of keeping the commitment is the most important part. Once the habit is set, then you can up the time to fit the kind of work you want to do.
Set Your Time
Not long ago I read of a guy who was determined to get in the shape of his life. However he had never been able to make more than a few days of any gym membership. The problem with any new habit is that it is a change and change is painful, doubly so when you are stiff and sore from the work after a good hour workout that you are not really ready for. His solution was to just show up for five minutes every day and do something for those five minutes.
We all know just five minutes of a random exercise will not get you looking like a Greek god, but the plan was not about divinity. It was about building a working habit that would not break. In his case the habit to show up every day no matter what.
The same mindset is essential to the writer. We have to put the seat of our pants in the seat of the chair if we want the words, any words, to flow onto the page. Rosanne Cash said it well in Composed; the muse has no respect for dilatants. All of us tend to be dilatants when we are not committed. I have to thank Pressfield for finding that one. He’s one of those little genius guides that kick your butt down the road to read and do things you would never have done. Thanks Steven, I would never have read outside books by writers alone without you and Rosanne.
Place
When you sit down you have to get used to the place. The newer the place is the more new things there are to distract you. For the writer, distraction kills. It kills your time. Kills space in your mind. Kills your work.
The solution is to cut the chatter in your head. You need to remove as much chaos as possible from your world as possible so that you can cut the chatter from your head and focus. The best way I have found for this is to have a set place that most of your writing takes place and maybe one or two others that you have worked in long enough to be comfortable as backups.
In my case my main place is my desk area. This is often where I scribble away when things are more quiet, like the earlier mornings or evenings after the kids are locked into a show or bed. My second is the main library of the local college(WWU). I also have a coffee shop I use for idea generating and general back work, but not for articles or books. It’s just not the right feel.
Comfortable Space
That reminds me. Make sure the place is comfortable. You want to be able to mentally lock out the notice. This was a hard one for me years ago when our kids were small and made a racket. My wife grew up in a larger family with far more noise than I and my kid sister generated. She came into the situation (running her own blog) already hard wired for it. I have had to play catch up on the space decluttering part.
Though like myself, she has had to find a place away for those times that even with her incredible monk meditation mind set she needed a place to run to just to focus. Here’s is a slightly different coffee shop. Coffee shops I have to admit are great.
For the price of a cup of coffee or two you can have a day rent office space with Wi-Fi, no loud kids, and a cheerful atmosphere that is both professional (a great mind set to have) and laid back. Work gets done.
A why
As with all things knowing why you want to do this is important. A why gives you a reason to be miserable and learn to enjoy it. Once you learn that lesson, the rest is all downhill. You do not need a grand why, just one that works for you. It can be love of the work, or you just need some money any money. All that matters is you have and know your why.
The pain/ In marine the suck.
You need to commit to pain that comes in the writing process. You are going to have to give up some things. Depending on when and where you choose to work there will be some pain. That is pain you will have to, as we say in the Marines “Suck it up”, courage. Courage is the only way you are going to say no to another drink with your friends so you can go home and get enough sleep before getting up to put in three hours first thing with your tenth rewrite of chapter twelve because it does not work. Courage is the only way you are going to deal with a spouse loosing it then still return to the words instead of getting a drink, going to bed or both. You must commit to the Marine Corp’s most valuable lesson, “Embrace the suck.”
A Plan/ Process
All writing is planned and tracked. Everything from books to TV commercials is planned. So too is the work that creates the work. That means if you want to be good you work with a plan and track it. There are lots of ways to do this, you need to choose what works for you and use it.
For myself I write my day’s project down with hours in a simple grid journal and I track my projects in a spiral notebook sized desk calendar with large grids. I put my project in one corner and note if I meditated with the kids that day in another. I track my workouts in my grid journal along with how many days I have consistently written every day. Today that current run is 1,169 days.
Tracking your pojects is more than just ego. It’s a closed biofeedback look giving you positive reinforcement to keep the trend going. I don’t worry about missing targets because I have a minimum standard in play to ensure I maintain the habit and meet my deadlines. It’s one of those little tricks I have used to make commitment work. Should I miss a beat, I know that my commitment will bring me back on line tomorrow. Winning this game is not about winning over the losses. It’s all about getting up when you fall.
Batch Method
Being organized is the other side of the process. Break your tasks up into small chunks. Keep the chunks small enough so you avoid overwhelm. Work in phases so that you create ideas, rough drafts, edit and then publish/ ship as Seth Godin puts it, individually. At the very least you should have a break between them, mostly to let your brain rest and your higher mind can work subconsciously without constant input.
The batch method is what I recommend. I did not get this till I saw a Tim Ferris video. Suddenly it made sense. I have found it works for some things and not for others. There are no hard and fast rules. You are going to have to experiment to see what works for you. The guide lines are to break the process down.
Ideas–Set a block of time up to work on ideas. Sit down and work only on the ideas for the project, say 100 articles to be written over the next three to six months. Schedule some time to research those ideas.
The writing–Your first block of time is for rough drafts, fast, no more research, no editing and just cover the page. Get those ideas down.
The editing–Now you put the blue pencil to the page. Be critical. Treat it professionally. Do not be kind. The rough draft is for creative and kind. You let your inner child run free. Now you have to curtail that child’s world into some form of civilized manner that other people will actually like reading.
Your First Step.
Commit to creating your plan and get it done.
Next Step.
Commit to get up when you fall. No matter how good you get stuff will happen. You will fall. The article will fail. The book will not strike the right tone. The sales will crash. The critics will eviscerate you. That’s why having resilience is so important. You have to commit to, as is said in judo, “Fall six times. Get up seven.”
You must commit to getting back up and trying again. Learn from your mistakes. Find out what you can do to make it work. Get the ditch bound wheel back on the pavement. Writing is a practice. Every time you create and ship a work, you learn something. What works? What doesn’t? Learn. Move on down the path. Trust the process.
Final thoughts
Learning to write with commitment is a process as much as anything else. Using goal allows us to master it. The only thing is you must commit.
To get words done Isaac Asimov Michael Crichton remain the role models of solid writing production. If you want to learn what skills you need to write a lot, you have to look at those who have written a lot. Since there are no off the rack solutions, you are going to have to compare some of them to get an idea of what common ground they share that I could use. I have found the most useful writing tools by looking at writers I like and comparing their processes.
Two of my favorite writers are Isaac Asimov and Michael Crichton. On the surface they seem very different in how they wrote. Crichton worked in intense periods for each project with breaks between, while Asimov is famous for not doing anything else other than writing. Asimov wrote in fiction and non-fiction. Crichton really focused on fiction.
Yet it is not their difference that made them produce so much. Nor are those differences the reason they were ultimately successful.
Love and Critics
The first key reason really comes down to the fact that they both loved their work. You have to love your work or it will not fly. Somerset Maugham once said that “Books can’t matter much if their authors themselves don’t think they matter.” A Writer’s Notebook
The second reason is they did not listen to the critics or even the inner one we all have. They listened instead to their own voice.
Asimov’s Process
Asimov worked large chunks of time every day. What he felt like did not matter. He got to work. He used a very minimalist straight forward approach in his writing style. His critics sometimes even complained on how clean he wrote. James Gunn described I Robot as :
“Except for two stories [of Asimov]—”Liar!” and “Evidence”—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent… The robot stories and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.”
Asimov himself was not offended. His writing is much like Ernest Hemingway’s. Asimov himself said:
“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”
Asimov wrote in the flow, often producing books in just one draft. He said that when he found a point where he could not find a solution he chose to not resist those sticking points by just plowing through, but instead he moved on to something else till his brain could formulate an answer. This is why he worked with so many typewriters at one time. Moving gave his brain a rest so that he could more quickly find solutions.
Crichton’s Process
Crichton worked in a start and stop process on one project. He tended to work in flowing times like a maniac, from an organized outline, and often using plots out of Victorian era writing and was known to shift his work days around, by getting up earlier in the mornings, to keep the inner resistance down long enough to complete the work.
Crichton’s critics claimed he lacked anything literary. Bruce Cook said Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery was “written directly with the requirements of the screen in mind” and said “never really gets inside his characters.” Science Fiction author Greg Bear said Jurassic Park had “excitement in large quantities”, predicting that it would “make a terrific movie.” But he did not like Ian Malcolm’s “extended philosophizing” on chaos theory. “Long before Malcolm has his say, this reader, at least, was hoping for some more dinosaurs to put him out of his misery.”
What They Share
Asimov and Crichton’s work was not about tomorrow or yesterday. It was what they did today that mattered. Both focused was the work while ignoring the wait for the muse. They were the soul mates with many of the more prolific writers of the late eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Somerset Maugham pointed out that loving your writing is the most important aspect of your work.
“A prolific writer, therefore, has to have self assurance. He can’t sit around doubting the quality of his writing. Rather, he has to love his own writing… If I didn’t enjoy my writing so much, how on earth could I stand all the writing I do?”
Writer’s Secret
Both writers knew the secret was to read, learn, then Steal like an artist.
Asimov read volumes over a wide variety of subjects, much of which he used for grist in his works. Crichton read volumes, but his main source for plots was Victorian books that he used to create his stories. Asimov admitted books gave him both information and inspiration.
Writing is an act of faith, but every writer uses the muse. They act and the muse comes. That’s the faith. As Maugham said, “Fortunately, inspiration strikes every day at 9 o’clock.” Both writers knew and practiced this as well. You show up and start putting words on the page and things happen. Somewhere along the line the muse has to kick in. She can’t let you have all the fun.
A Time to Start
Depending on the time of his life, Asimov would start at 9 or 9:30 am then work to 9pm. Toward the end of his years, he would start at 8am and work to 10pm. When he was still a working professor, he would work around university lecture times with set writing periods. He worked every day, even on vacation with pen and paper instead of his normal typewriter.
Crichton got to work at set times as well, though he often changed the times to start earlier as the project developed so he would not lose the momentum of the previous day. This lead him famously on one project to rise so early that it drove his wife nuts. His solution was to check into the Kona Village where he worked round the clock till he finished his work.
Slaying the Inner Critic
Each had his own way to tackle his inner and outer critic. They knew the real critic they were fighting was the inner one.
Asimov tended to fight this voice by not fighting it when stuck. That’s why he, like so many writers, tended to have multiple projects simultaneously in play at various stages. When stuck with one, the writer can move on to another. In Asimov’s case he went this one better by having a separate typewriter set up for each project being worked on. He wisely knew if the work was ready, he would need no setup time. He could just start steam rolling over that inner urge to stop the instant he sat down.
“I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas. Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself able to write easily once more.”
Crichton’s momentum effort may have been hell on his household, but it did not fall down in self-destruction either.
Distractions Are Evil.
Asimov worked to remove the distraction in his life. He hated everything that kept him from writing, and even once commented about being forced to go on vacation. Another time he remarked that he hated sunny days because people used them as an excuse not to get words down. He also used this trait to make his writing more prolific in his editing process. As Asimov said:
“If I had the critic’s mentality (which I emphatically don’t), I would sit down and try to analyze my stories, work out the factors that make some more successful than others cultivate those factors, and simply explode with excellence. But the devil with that. I won’t buy success at the price of self-consciousness. I don’t have the temperament for it. I’ll write as I please and let the critics do the analyzing.”
For Asimov the editing work was done in his mind before he put words to the page. Much of his later work is pure first draft flow, as far as the paper is concerned. No one has any clue as to how many drafts he went through in his head before he set his fingers on the keys. He wrote with clarity of mind first then did not question what he wrote when he typed.
Asimov’s Memory
Remember Asimov is unique among modern writers for using mental reflection to write first then type out the finished copy. He really was sitting down with finished work when he typed all the time.
In How to Enjoy Writing, written with his wife, the pair recalled an example of his ability to do all of his work in his head then type it. Janet woke at 4 am and found Isaac wide awake. She asked if he was troubled and found that he had been awake for a couple of hours because he had woken up with an idea for his next Black Widower’s story. Amazed he was still in bed, she had told him to “Write it down.” But an unfazed Isaac said “I’m going back to sleep.” Janet told him that would mean he would not remember it later. Isaac told her “I will” and he did. He might not have stood out in the ancient days when the writers of ancient Greece remembered virtually everything, but Asimov likely owes a great deal to his flow writing to having cultivated this ability.
“For one thing, I don’t write only when I’m writing. Whenever I’m away from my typewriter- eating, falling asleep, performing my ablutions- my mind keeps working… That’s why I’m always ready to write. Everything is, in a sense, already written. I can just sit down and type it all out” His ideas were the result of his “…thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to kill myself.” Isaac Asimov, A Memoir
Oats on Distractions
Joyce Carol Oats remarked that distraction is the greatest enemy of writing. We tend to think we are writing for five hours but in reality the interruptions from family and friends really make it closer to half an hour. Asimov was the poster boy for the possible end game on that.
Asimov Spartan
In later life Asimov lived in a suite. In it he had three main things. Five IBM Selectric typewriters, about 1000 books, 9 projects in various stages and his most prized view behind some drapes, a brick wall. He did not even have a kitchen to divert at meal times. He had his meals brought in.
That may be a little Spartan for some, but the lack of distraction is likely why he did not feel any loss when he sat down at 8am and did not quit till 10pm. He was not joking as much as honest when he once quipped, “I work whenever I am not doing anything else and I don’t like to do anything else.”
Asimov had much in common with many writers, even Steven king used a small secluded cubby area with a skylight, allowing form much needed light and cutting out far less desired distractions.
“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” ~ Stephen King, On Writing
Wrapping Up
For all writers everything is about evolving change, when it comes to our writing. We work constantly to purify our own processes to deal with distractions, critics, momentum, organization, the craft and work of writing, but of them all the things we deal with the most important part is the love of the work itself. You have to love what you write or the rest of it will not really matter much to anyone.
Writer’s self-discipline pays. Everything you will do in life has some form of feedback that comes with it. Most of the time we can see that feedback when we collect a paycheck, see our book reach number one on Amazon or someone praises our work in a review. But there is also a biological feedback that we feel when the day’s work at the keyboard is over. We are not the same people who sat down to figure out what was in our heads. Now we know that answer and we have kind of a feeling of ‘YESSS!’ in our souls.
Self-discipline is the key to getting to that feeling. That feeling for the writer is the instant gratification we have sought.
How do we develop self-discipline? In that question is the basis of it all. Self-discipline is something that can be learned and developed.
There are some guidelines to get started.
You have to have a goal.
No one ever does anything just by throwing something at the wall with the hope of it sticking. You have to aim for something. Set your goal and make it big to start. Then you pare that overall goal down to smaller steps so that you can get there.
I recently read of a writer who had written an article every week for over 15 years. He said that his goal had never been to write over 700 articles but instead just to write that week’s article every week. This is how to look at your goals. Break them down to a manageable amount and then focus on getting that done in the set time. Do not spend your time obsessing about the end game.
You have a deadline for the goal…maybe. Small steps definitely
Some long term goals cannot be scheduled like a bus. However, your small steps, such as achieving your word count today or your weekly production quota can. The longer goal might defy the creation of a dead line such as becoming a world class writer on an article a week, but the goal to have this week’s article written or this week’s chapter re-written can and should have a deadline. You need to keep this. When the timer goes off or the publication time for the article rolls around, you need to hit the button and call it a day.
Visualize your goal, but do it like athletes do.
Most advice I have seen is to look at your goal, which is great. However, the breakdown I have seen is that then you are left with the question of Now what do you do? You are off on Some Day Isle is what you wind up doing, hopelessly trapped in the future. You have to reel it in and get down to the work today. That means you should practice visualizing the work itself.
In a study some years ago they took kids on a basketball team and had them break into three groups. The first threw free throws for practice every day. The second did nothing. The third sat down and only visualized throwing perfect shots every day. The results were along the lines of what you would expect for the first two groups. The first improved. The second did not. The third however did the unexpected at the time. They improved almost as much as the first group. This is the reason so many athletes work not only with the end game goals but also the process too.
Practice your habit first. Habits make discipline
Habits are the first step you take every time. They happen often without your even knowing it. Many disciplined people make it a practice to focus on their habits instead of the practice to ensure the practice happens. Done long enough the habits become a discipline in and of themselves which in turn reinforces the discipline of the practice. As Sensei Sammons used to tell us, “The hardest part of karate is just showing up.” The key habit for everything, not just writing, is showing up.
For a writer the practice is writing for a given time every day. To practice showing up you need a habit. For some that is a prayer or recital of something that focuses the mind, others use a mind dump before writing. I have seen some habits include writing a short amount of time like two to five minutes, putting down one or two sentences, or, one of my favorites is writing down just five words to get started. I like that last one since I have often found myself writing just one four word sentence when I was struggling to get started, but that extra word always forced me to get two sentences, often more, down. Had I been using my old standby of just one sentence, I would never have gotten past it on those four word days.
That last point brings me to another point.
Always try new ideas, no matter how crazy they seem. The point of sitting down is to get more words on the page. To do that you have to be ready to kick start things in different ways from time to time. Building a variety of tactics and strategies to improve your habits always pays off in ways you did not expect.
Keep consistency in mind.
Working on a single habit every day, like getting at least five words down is enough to move you forward. Everyone runs into things that will take us away from the desk. Most of those times it is nothing less than our own brain trying to avoid the hard things. Consistency is hard. However not publishing is even harder.
We lose things like money, self-esteem, confidence, etc… Nothing is built over night. Not Rome. Nor your ideal body. Not even your mind. Most definitely your body of written works is not either. The key to achieving our largest goals is consistent application of small habits that reinforce larger habits that are key to getting there. For karate the habit of training two hours a day three times a week was based off my showing up habit. The result was five years later when I had my black belt in Goju –Ryu karate.
Accept discomfort and get comfortable with it.
Anytime we want to make a change we are going to be uncomfortable. We are working outside of our comfort zone. Humans seem hardwired to run from uncomfortable things. We allow ourselves all kinds of distractions to help us avoid getting things done. Fill your evenings with movies, games or scrolling around on social media? Why not? How about positive things like cleaning out the car or paying bills to avoid getting those words down. Sounds reasonable to me. Many a writer would rather deal with screaming children or argue with their spouse than do their work at times.
Why is that? It’s simple. Because writing is painful at times. We have to sit there fighting with the blank space before us. Our only weapon is what little faith we have that inside us we have something to fill it. Our greatest fear in those moments…? We fear our addled minds have nothing to put there. Nothing at all. In this we lie to ourselves on this. We have a box in our minds.
Believe there is always something in the box.
Patricia Ryan taught improvisation at Stanford for years. Her most famous lesson was the invisible box. Ryan would have her students stand before her and pick up an invisible box with a lid. They were told to hold the box a moment then open the lid. She would ask them what was inside. The answers were varied from bracelets or scarves to rare or ancient items. The key thing to remember is that there was always something in the box. The students always found an answer when they opened the box.
Writer’s block is a myth. There is always something in the mist. It’s our job as writers to believe it is there and it will be, even if it is just five words today. Tomorrow it will be more. Eventually we will meet our deadline and move on to the next work.
Congratulate or forgive your-self as needed.
The goal is to get your work done, then move on to repeat the process with the next work. You start tomorrow. You win regardless of whether the work is a triumph or a failure. Wins are like laurel wreaths. They feel great in the moment, but they mean nothing outside that moment. A failure only means you have something new to learn and now you know what does not work. Try again. Both are little more than distractions if dwelt upon. They cannot really help or hurt you by themselves. Dwell on them and they become a very potent force that will bring all your efforts to a complete stop.
SEALS Know the Way
The SEAL teams are full of some of the most successful people on the planet when it comes to discipline. One of the many stories I have heard over the years is how they over come failures and successes.
At no time do SEALs allow their emotions of anger, fear, guilt or frustration to build up. Those emotions only drag us under. In the teams, the correct response is simply to accept, forgive, then create a new attack plan and act on it . In the SEAL view point they failed because they were adequate. Adequate is not really a win. It means you need to grow. Success is dealt with in a similar manner. Accept and release then go back into training.
At the end of the day, the pay off for writers is that we get to launch ourselves into this fantastic life that is writing where many less daring souls dare not enter. It takes guts just to be able to say for all who might hear, “I am a writer.”
“Decluttering is the solution”, I found myself saying when I discovered that too many books and files actually killed the entire concept of a desk. I found myself mumbling “I have no room to write things” as I moved about observing the desk before me. I know I tend to leave piles of my current work in progress mixed in among all kinds of other papers and spread out over the available surface as I think through the process. It tends to slow my process because the space is too full of books calling my mind away from the subject at hand or bills that want paying. I find myself looking at other things instead of the work I need to do today…Now.
Understand the clutter
Avoiding the clutter is classic stalling; some would call it your inner resistance. This chaos is the key reason to clear your desk. The rule of thumb here is clutter is fine, but only if it is the only thing you are working with. When just spreading out the details becomes a distraction because other things are mixed into what you are looking at, it is not a useful tool.
I am still far from perfect on decluttering, but at least I have cut the clutter reduced down from a stack of fiction books to read, a few various tomes on improving writing and the months bills to a desk calendar, a planner and current book notebooks, my computer (which is another source of clutter all by itself), One fiction book in mid-edit, my reading for my current book, writer’s mind practice materials, an expanding tickle file, a timer and lamp. It’s still a lot, but at least I can now work on my desk because I can see the surface of my desk. That for me is a big win.
Clean thinking machine
Second on the decluttering list is, you guessed it, the computer. I had no idea I had collected so many files in my One Note or any number of various files all over my desktop and main file storage boxes. It was a nightmare of going through all the collected pictures, memes, articles, idea notes, etc… Nothing was consolidated in a single file. Disgustingly I found quite a few times I had several files on the same subject all over the system. I had five on blogging in OneNote alone. Some of them were even duplicates of other files.
I would like to say I cleared this in one easy go. No. That is far from the truth. It took me two weeks to declutter and organize the picture and video files alone. I had to be ruthless. At times it almost felt like I was going to sacrifice a child or amputate an arm at times.
When I was done I could not believe how much faster my machine started to work as the files decreased the space on the hard drive. I had grown used to the speed it chugged through things along with comments from my teens on how slow it was.
Next decluttering task
While I have greatly enjoyed how much better my machine performs, I have liked more the increased energy I have not to write in the mornings. It is like closing all the open files in my mind, giving me focus again. It took my production from maybe half a page or so a day to knocking out three or four good pages in the morning alone. I tell you that is a lot when you are writing the story in a spiral notebook with a Bic crystal pen.
The next thing I take on next is the file pile that is my storage case next to my desk and the folder basket under my desk. For now I leave that till tomorrow.
There are some really amazing studies out there that show a cluttered space does affect your emotions, health and mind. It’s not a one way street though. We gain and loose with clutter. A messy desk can make us creative too. Like many things in life, it’s all about balance. Even the great Einstein had a messy desk, but you should remember that the area around his desk was not cluttered.
Here are five ways to make the decluttering process easier.
Take one small task at a time.
Be careful with this one. It’s easy to take what you think is a small thing only to find that you are going to have a lot more than an hour of work in a hurry. When you do find yourself in too deep, readjust your expectations, but do not quit. Once you are engaged, just sink your teeth into it and get mule stubborn. Refuse to quit till the project is done, but change your expectations to limit your bouts and their times. Then take it on like Rocky. Those piles don’t stand a chance against that kind of force.
Limit the time you are going to work.
Use just five minutes when you start. You can quit after five minutes no matter the amount done. You’re done. You can do more, but five minutes gives you a running start and an easy win. This game is about the long term. You did not get into this mess in just an hour. You won’t get out an hour either. Decluttering is a process. It takes time to change both your space and your mind. Give yourself enough to come back tomorrow and have another go
The corollary of setting a minim amount of time.
Stop your work after a set maximum amount of time. It’s easy to keep pushing till you are sore in body and mind. The game plan here is to be able to get on with other things need to do in your life and not burn yourself out.
Do some decluttering every day.
Like anything else you do daily, working on the clutter in your life can become easier and more effective over time.
Congratulate yourself for every win.
If you worked today, you won. You can hack this. I reward myself with a note on my calendar to show I have done the work and reinforce the effort. Keep every trick to keep yourself motivated at your disposal.
Choose to just clean up first. Ignore the word declutter.
Dust has its own negative feel. A pile of awkward papers and books looks like an accident about to happen by itself. Adding some dust just adds to the misery. It might not reduce your weighty stuff list, but neat stacks sans dust will make you feel better. Feeling better when you sit down to write is part of the battle. Removing the chaos bombed landscape before your eyes will helps remove the chaos in your mind.
My decluttering findings.
The more I have worked at this over the last few months, the more I have found that I have less resistance to sit down and write. When writing, I can stay focused on my work without so many distractions It is an ever improving biofeedback loop that works. Give it a try.
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.
