Routinely Retrained

I’m back, more or less, after a couple months away from writing, concentrating instead on my personal life. More or less, I say, unsure, because when there is significant, even significantly wonderful, change in one’s life, routine is the first thing to suffer.

And without routine, creative, artistic work is hard to sustain.

I had a pretty particular routine worked out. Up in the morning, kids off to school, drinking coffee outside, admiring the morning while thinking about the day’s writing and the dogs snuffled and sniffed their way around the back yard.

Then inside, housework, shower, and to work. Only the briefest examination of emails, then straight to MS Word, a quick read over the last few paragraphs from the day before then fingers to keyboard, and even if I wasn’t exactly clear on what the day’s writing was going to be, I was usually far far away in that fictional world before too much time had gone by.

Excuses are too easy to come by when you’re a writer, or I suspect, any other type of artist. I don’t really feel like it today. I have too many other things to do. I don’t really know what I’m going to write today and I think most of what I’ve already written is rubbish anyway.

Without some sort of routine, no matter how much I’m enjoying the rest of my life, I feel untethered, uncertain about what I’m doing, and even its purpose. I don’t write, then start to feel panicked because I’m not writing and it’s so hard to get back into the routine of it. I fling myself around like a leaf in a strong southerly, directionless, smacking wetly against one thing then another until I’m plastered against a wall somewhere not knowing what I’m doing because I’m not writing.

Routine is what allows us to feel comfortable about self-discipline, and believe me you need self-discipline in spades if you’re going to write a book. It takes a pretty good serving of both courage and faith to sit down each day and pile words upon a page. The easiest way to find both those things is to pretend it’s no big deal. Make everything feel normal and unobtrusive. Sidle up to the desk as though it’s the most natural thing in the world, and it does feel pretty normal when you’re doing it every day as a matter of course.

Turn up for the job like it is just a job. I’m on time, the brain is ready because I’ve trained it to be ready at the same time each day, the muses are here and waiting because this is when they’ve come to expect me, so now we can just get to work and the words with flow or they won’t but I’m here either way.

So a change in routine can be more of a big deal than just a few missed days or weeks. There is a whole retraining that needs to happen. Creative habits are hard won and easily lost. Making a new routine after time away requires, it seems, much gritting of teeth and sheer bloody determination. I tell myself that I may not be sitting down to work at the usual time anymore, after the usual things, but I’m sitting down anyway, and I’ll put fingers to keyboard and I’ll write.

And I’ll do it every day.

Because that’s what writers do. And that’s what I am.

Filed under: Seducing the Muse