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.
Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash