The D Word

by Christina Lay

Discipline. Okay, there, I’ve said it. Most creative types I know recoil at the word. Discipline invokes loveless toil, stern teachers with knuckle-whacking rulers, and a sort of relentless grind that seems the very antithesis of the artistic flow. However, I’ll let you in on a secret. The artistic flow is much, much easier to achieve if one has discipline. It’s a drag, I know, but sitting around waiting for the muse to twiddle on her magical flute is about the most effective way there is to get nothing done.

This is actually not news for anyone who’s written a novel, completed a painting, or mastered just about any craft, but I thought it would be worth talking about again in this era of day pajamas, and an endless stream of Blursdays.

I’ll go ahead and admit right now that when my boss informed me that we wouldn’t be coming in to the office for at least a month (ha, ha), I didn’t not gasp in dismay.  I have spent most of my working life yearning and scheming for more time to write, so the prospect of an entire shiny month of setting my own schedule, of not doing the commute or the nine-to-five zombie shuffle, didn’t sound too bad. I mean, if we had to live through a pandemic, why not do it at home, where the cats and the readily accessible tea and the home computer surrounded by a tsunami of novel notes reside?

Those first weeks at home were quite productive in the writing department.  With no boss tapping her foot waiting for me to arrive at the joyless cubicle, I could continue my morning writing session for as long as I wanted. As long as I got my work done in a timely fashion, who cared when I did it? I wrote many words, and also completed a lot of tasks at home.

But there’s this thing about living through a pandemic, not to mention riots, wildfires, assaults on the nation’s capitol, endless attempts to subvert democracy, etcetera. It’s all very distracting. So naturally, first thing in the morning, instead of bringing up my WIP, I would log on to the Washington Post for my daily cuppa morning Horror and Outrage.  Long, long ago, I trained myself to NOT CHECK MY EMAIL before beginning to write. However, it only takes one pandemic to up-end decades of practice and yes, Discipline, and so the doomscrolling began to eat away at that hard won habit.

I mentioned that I completed a lot of tasks at home as well. The thing about tasks-at-home is that there is no end to them. So now, with my flexible schedule, there was no reason not to abandon the computer mid-day, mid-week, in order to pull weeds or clean out closets.  But the combination of writing as long as I wanted and getting tasks done was starting to encroach on my work productivity, so…maybe I could take a morning off from writing now and again, now that I had so much more time to play with? 

And just why was I still getting up at 6:00 AM anyway? There was no need to set the alarm anymore. I could get up whenever, as long as I got my work done in a timely fashion yadda yadda yadda. The sense of urgency continued to fade, time no longer a precious commodity.

Inevitably the doomscrolling and the task completing and the worrying about the possible end of the world and the drudgery of sitting in one damn place all day and the work files piled on top of my novel notes like salt upon the Earth and the mysteriously shrinking day (possibly due to not setting the alarm anymore), well…you get the idea. My decades long, hard-won habit of getting up early and writing every morning began to erode. Discipline snuck out the window to go chase butterflies.

I have always grudgingly suspected that my ongoing, high-level of productivity was due to the fact that I was forced by my jobs to maintain a schedule, to consciously prioritize writing, and to show up at the page no matter what, and lo and behold, this suspicion has been confirmed. Sure, the no-matter-what has never been quite so obnoxious, but cancerdidn’t slow me down, for crying out loud. What exactly happened here? I’ll tell you what. What happened was a many-pronged assault on my belief in and dedication to the idea of discipline. It was not deliberate. It was not abrupt. But it did happen, and now I’m dealing with the consequences.

In this case, the consequences are a whole lotta words with no point, and then no words, and then the dismay that I failed to register back when the world came to a halt in March of 2020. I have faced the most evil of phrases: Writer’s Block, and recognized it for what it truly is; the loss of a carefully honed habit.  How do I regain the habit?  Discipline. Yuck.

The mental toll of the Year from Hell has made it difficult for me to commit to any one of my many projects, so I’ve decided to begin a thorough edit and rewrite of an epic fantasy I completed about six years ago and then abandoned. 

Reading, editing, note taking, those things I can do. And I will do them, every morning, no matter what. I will set the alarm, ignore the email, and show up. I will work through the rewrite and hopefully at the end of it, my discipline will have been firmly reestablished and the agony of editing will spur me on to write new fiction again.  This isn’t like a switch that can be flipped. I have a lot of bad habits that need purging and a mushy life that needs firming up. Perhaps you find your self in the same mushy circumstances?

If you don’t have a monster rewrite to work on, journaling, timed-writing, word games; anything that gets your hand moving and your pandemic-fried brain looking the other way will do, as long as you do it, regularly, on schedule, no matter what. Remember, you’re forming a habit that will serve you well no matter what the world throws at us next.