Writing is a creative pursuit. It isn’t like traditional, non-creative, jobs where you punch a clock and pick up a paycheck. There’s no boss to report to or inbox to tackle. It’s less structured than all that. And not.
Writing, no matter if you are trying to pen the next bestseller, write a hard-hitting blog or land a corporate client, it is up to you. Even if you work for a publisher, you still have to fill the page. And that takes discipline. To get the work, come up with ideas, and fill the page.
Without willpower and determination, it will be difficult to pay your bills and survive.
Writers write. And not just random words, but marketable stories, cohesive articles, compelling speeches, imaginative scripts.
If you want to make a living at this, you need to produce finished pieces because you can’t sell what isn’t written or finished.
Discipline is what gets you from a blank page to a finished manuscript. Discipline is what keeps you from giving up or giving in to those emotions and bad habits that hold are holding you back. It is a necessary skill to survive. So why is it so hard to develop? We know it’s good for us. We understand its importance. So why do we resist it?
Because it’s human nature. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, “Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.”
It is up to you, the writer, to push against the resistance you feel—the fear, the worries, the self-loathing. Push against whatever it is that holds you back from writing and remove it. Move past it and keep writing.
Discipline is about taking action even when you don’t feel like it. It is working one minute longer, writing one more sentence, one more paragraph, one more chapter. It is staying course and inching toward your goal.
Samual Thomas Davies said that self-discipline is about “acting in accordance with your thoughts—not your feelings.” Writing does not happen when you are feeling motivated. Motivation is nothing but desire and mood. Discipline doesn’t care about those things. It is more determined than that. Think of it as a drill instructor who lives inside you who wants you to write no matter how you feel.
All discipline wants is progress. And that is the biggest reason to cling to it. Because you are rarely going to feel like it. Creativity doesn’t work like that. It isn’t a switch you can turn on and off. But it can be coaxed by habit. It can be tapped into with discipline. It can be found with hard work.
Conditions are never going to be perfect. Your writing space will never look like the ones in movies. Your pen will never write on its own. And your stories are never going to exactly as they are in your dreams. But that’s okay. They can still be great.
Writers are emotional creatures. They build worlds and people and all that entails. They are immersed in emotion as they work. But it wold be foolish to let those essential story-baed emotions to get in the way of doing the work. Writers have to push beyond their emotions in order to write their character’s emotions.
Louis L’Amour got it right when he said: “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” Discipline turns your faucet on. It shuts off the emotional entanglement and makes room for creativity to happen.
This is part I of a IV part series. It will continue with Embracing Discipline by Changing Your Mindset and will include tips on how to do that.