Writer’s self-discipline pays. Everything you will do in life has some form of feedback that comes with it. Most of the time we can see that feedback when we collect a paycheck, see our book reach number one on Amazon or someone praises our work in a review. But there is also a biological feedback that we feel when the day’s work at the keyboard is over. We are not the same people who sat down to figure out what was in our heads. Now we know that answer and we have kind of a feeling of ‘YESSS!’ in our souls.
Self-discipline is the key to getting to that feeling. That feeling for the writer is the instant gratification we have sought.
How do we develop self-discipline? In that question is the basis of it all. Self-discipline is something that can be learned and developed.
There are some guidelines to get started.
You have to have a goal.
No one ever does anything just by throwing something at the wall with the hope of it sticking. You have to aim for something. Set your goal and make it big to start. Then you pare that overall goal down to smaller steps so that you can get there.
I recently read of a writer who had written an article every week for over 15 years. He said that his goal had never been to write over 700 articles but instead just to write that week’s article every week. This is how to look at your goals. Break them down to a manageable amount and then focus on getting that done in the set time. Do not spend your time obsessing about the end game.
You have a deadline for the goal…maybe. Small steps definitely
Some long term goals cannot be scheduled like a bus. However, your small steps, such as achieving your word count today or your weekly production quota can. The longer goal might defy the creation of a dead line such as becoming a world class writer on an article a week, but the goal to have this week’s article written or this week’s chapter re-written can and should have a deadline. You need to keep this. When the timer goes off or the publication time for the article rolls around, you need to hit the button and call it a day.
Visualize your goal, but do it like athletes do.
Most advice I have seen is to look at your goal, which is great. However, the breakdown I have seen is that then you are left with the question of Now what do you do? You are off on Some Day Isle is what you wind up doing, hopelessly trapped in the future. You have to reel it in and get down to the work today. That means you should practice visualizing the work itself.
In a study some years ago they took kids on a basketball team and had them break into three groups. The first threw free throws for practice every day. The second did nothing. The third sat down and only visualized throwing perfect shots every day. The results were along the lines of what you would expect for the first two groups. The first improved. The second did not. The third however did the unexpected at the time. They improved almost as much as the first group. This is the reason so many athletes work not only with the end game goals but also the process too.
Practice your habit first. Habits make discipline
Habits are the first step you take every time. They happen often without your even knowing it. Many disciplined people make it a practice to focus on their habits instead of the practice to ensure the practice happens. Done long enough the habits become a discipline in and of themselves which in turn reinforces the discipline of the practice. As Sensei Sammons used to tell us, “The hardest part of karate is just showing up.” The key habit for everything, not just writing, is showing up.
For a writer the practice is writing for a given time every day. To practice showing up you need a habit. For some that is a prayer or recital of something that focuses the mind, others use a mind dump before writing. I have seen some habits include writing a short amount of time like two to five minutes, putting down one or two sentences, or, one of my favorites is writing down just five words to get started. I like that last one since I have often found myself writing just one four word sentence when I was struggling to get started, but that extra word always forced me to get two sentences, often more, down. Had I been using my old standby of just one sentence, I would never have gotten past it on those four word days.
That last point brings me to another point.
Always try new ideas, no matter how crazy they seem. The point of sitting down is to get more words on the page. To do that you have to be ready to kick start things in different ways from time to time. Building a variety of tactics and strategies to improve your habits always pays off in ways you did not expect.
Keep consistency in mind.
Working on a single habit every day, like getting at least five words down is enough to move you forward. Everyone runs into things that will take us away from the desk. Most of those times it is nothing less than our own brain trying to avoid the hard things. Consistency is hard. However not publishing is even harder.
We lose things like money, self-esteem, confidence, etc… Nothing is built over night. Not Rome. Nor your ideal body. Not even your mind. Most definitely your body of written works is not either. The key to achieving our largest goals is consistent application of small habits that reinforce larger habits that are key to getting there. For karate the habit of training two hours a day three times a week was based off my showing up habit. The result was five years later when I had my black belt in Goju –Ryu karate.
Accept discomfort and get comfortable with it.
Anytime we want to make a change we are going to be uncomfortable. We are working outside of our comfort zone. Humans seem hardwired to run from uncomfortable things. We allow ourselves all kinds of distractions to help us avoid getting things done. Fill your evenings with movies, games or scrolling around on social media? Why not? How about positive things like cleaning out the car or paying bills to avoid getting those words down. Sounds reasonable to me. Many a writer would rather deal with screaming children or argue with their spouse than do their work at times.
Why is that? It’s simple. Because writing is painful at times. We have to sit there fighting with the blank space before us. Our only weapon is what little faith we have that inside us we have something to fill it. Our greatest fear in those moments…? We fear our addled minds have nothing to put there. Nothing at all. In this we lie to ourselves on this. We have a box in our minds.
Believe there is always something in the box.
Patricia Ryan taught improvisation at Stanford for years. Her most famous lesson was the invisible box. Ryan would have her students stand before her and pick up an invisible box with a lid. They were told to hold the box a moment then open the lid. She would ask them what was inside. The answers were varied from bracelets or scarves to rare or ancient items. The key thing to remember is that there was always something in the box. The students always found an answer when they opened the box.
Writer’s block is a myth. There is always something in the mist. It’s our job as writers to believe it is there and it will be, even if it is just five words today. Tomorrow it will be more. Eventually we will meet our deadline and move on to the next work.
Congratulate or forgive your-self as needed.
The goal is to get your work done, then move on to repeat the process with the next work. You start tomorrow. You win regardless of whether the work is a triumph or a failure. Wins are like laurel wreaths. They feel great in the moment, but they mean nothing outside that moment. A failure only means you have something new to learn and now you know what does not work. Try again. Both are little more than distractions if dwelt upon. They cannot really help or hurt you by themselves. Dwell on them and they become a very potent force that will bring all your efforts to a complete stop.
SEALS Know the Way
The SEAL teams are full of some of the most successful people on the planet when it comes to discipline. One of the many stories I have heard over the years is how they over come failures and successes.
At no time do SEALs allow their emotions of anger, fear, guilt or frustration to build up. Those emotions only drag us under. In the teams, the correct response is simply to accept, forgive, then create a new attack plan and act on it . In the SEAL view point they failed because they were adequate. Adequate is not really a win. It means you need to grow. Success is dealt with in a similar manner. Accept and release then go back into training.
At the end of the day, the pay off for writers is that we get to launch ourselves into this fantastic life that is writing where many less daring souls dare not enter. It takes guts just to be able to say for all who might hear, “I am a writer.”
After discipline comes commitment. Writing Commitment over Writing Goal: The journey over the arrival
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash