Writing and Discipline

[D. Gray Warrior]

I like to write, but I struggle with discipline and issues such as self doubt and perfectionism.

While I don't write everyday, I still strive to write fairly often. Usually, it'll be two or three days a week at the bare minimum. Even when I do write, my productivity varies. Some days I feel really inspired and write almost an entire page. Other times, all I can get down are a couple of sentences. It's rare that I'll write anything longer than a page per session. The one exception for me seem to be scripts, as they are formatted differently from standard prose. It's a little disheartening as I hear about writers, both professional and still unpublished mentioning that they write 2k words a day.

Another thing is time management. I have to juggle writing with other activities that distract me from it, such as TV or videogames.

As for writing itself, I often find I hate what I write. I know rough drafts are supposed to be shite and revised later, but I still allow my perfectionism to get in the way. I think to myself "Most other writers' rough drafts are terrible, but mine are even worse."

Is anyone else here struggling with this? How did you develop better writing disicipline.

 

[pmmg]

I would say I used to fight with those types of thoughts. So...I changed strategy.

My current strategy is write at least one sentence a night. After that...I can quit if I want, or continue. Its small enough to be easy to achieve, and I dont ever feel like I failed.

While I do like to spend the day working out in my head what I will write, I do give myself permission to write it ugly. If its too ugly, so what?...you cant correct something not written, but you can correct ugly.

I also remove distractions. I've not played video games in years, and gave up my late night TV viewing to spend on story time instead. It was not hard, cause nothing has been worth watching for years.

In my house, I am not usually on my own till after 11:00pm, and usually I dont start writing till after 12:00 am. Sometimes its really late (or early depending on how you choose to see it). When writing, I play only music that does not distract. If it does, I change to instrumentals. No internet...no thesaurus, no research, no name generators...just get it on page, and leave that for another time.

How did develop it? Well, I stopped setting goals, and decided on a strategy instead. It really comes down to what you want. If in 90 days, you want to say I finished another video game, then thats easy to achieve...but for me, its also meaningless. Another video game played, one of hundreds. No one cares, and everyone who tried won it as well. If instead, you want to look back on 90 days worth of your creation...you gotta get busy.

Thats about it. It is deciding over wanting.

 

[Finchbearer]

I’m also a perfectionist in that nothing ever gets finished, and therefore can stop me from achieving things. Not the best feeling. How to overcome it…I don’t know!

 

[pmmg]

Deciding when it is finished is a whole nuther topic...

 

[Penpilot]

I thought the same way. I felt the same way, and I spun my wheels for many-many years. I would edit and re-edit trying to get every word perfect. I remember spending hours and hours on something making it perfect only to see how minuscule the word count was. Then, after listening to some writing podcasts and reading some writing books, I learned a few things. The most important, IMHO, is you have to finish if you ever want to progress as a writer.

I stopped and I asked myself what I wanted out of my writing. Did I just want to do it for fun, or did I want to one day make it my job? I decided I wanted it to be the latter. So, I started to write every day, and not only that, I forced myself to push on ahead and let things be imperfect. A part of learning to write is learning to not only start a story it's learning how to finish. If all you ever do is start, you only ever practice starting. If all you do is start and quit, you only practice starting and quitting. You have to practice finishing, no matter how bad the end result is. You have to believe that it doesn't matter if it's crap now, because you can always make it better in the edits. Also it's never as bad as you think and it's never as good as it feels.

When I don't feel like writing, I ask myself do I really want to be a writer or not? There's no right answer to this. It's a simple question to myself. In life there are lots of things we like the idea of doing, but when it comes down to priorities, they get put to the bottom of the list. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just about what you choose to do instead of doing something else. There's no writing police that will punish me for not writing. There are no consequences for me not using all the ideas I have in my head. There's only what I choose to do.

If I want to watch TV instead of write, I can do that, guilt free. If I want to play video games instead of reading a writing book, I can do that guilt free, too. But I'm honest with myself. I cannot complain that I do not have time to write. I do, but I just choose to do something else instead. If doing other things is more important than writing, then they're more important. But you have to be honest with yourself. Do you want to write or do you only like the idea of having written? Knowing this is key.

If I want to be published I have to write, and I have to finish. Every story I've started and finished, I've learned something from the process, about writing and about myself. Now, I don't have trouble finishing stories. Now, I can focus more on making them better and better, and in the process become a better writer.

You will learn more from finishing an imperfect 100k book than you will from writing one perfect page. One perfect page does nothing for you. It's like someone who wants to be a singer and only ever sings one note.

At the end of the day, the choice is yours.

 

[Pegzy]

I wish I had more time to write. But then, conversely, sometimes when I have the time, I don't feel like writing or I try but no ideas come.
With the novel I finished and the one I'm doing now, I worked with a CP - 5000 words a week. So I had a target, and on both occasions it worked. There would be delays but on the whole the deadline strategy works for me.
I like to write when the rest of the household is sleeping, late night or early morning. No human voices, no dog barks. The latter can be quite cacophonic.

 

[pmmg]

I generally get 700 words a night, when its all flowing.

I have cats. They are not noisy, but one craves attention and tries to sit on things, like me, or my keyboard. He gets disappointed almost every night.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

There is no one size fits all answer, so what works for you is for you to figure out. That said, a few thoughts.

If writing shite is the issue, there is a question to ask: is it the writing itself or the story you're telling that is the problem, or both?

If story is the problem, study story, finish the project, and then go back through and try to find the problem.

If the writing/voice/style is the problem, consider writing one chapter as mini-story and then edit/rewrite while in between the editing/rewriting you study the fine points of writing. This educates and gives you time to distance from the writing. Rinse and repeat until happy. You might find that writing will become easier once you discover your voice.

If both are an issue, you have to make a choice: Would you prefer to learn how to write by crapping together 100k words that need a major overhaul in writing & story by the time you get to the end, or would you rather hammer your writing in repetitive patience (maybe for months or years) before finishing the work and having to worry most about the storytelling in editing?

Of course, nothing is quite so simple, but it's an approach you give a think.

 

[Mad Swede]

To me there are two aspects to writing discipline.

One is having the self-discipline to write when you must do so, no matter where you are or how you are feeling. That sort of self-dsicipline is a requirement when you have to write or edit something to order by a given deadline. Journalism is an example. Military orders are an example from my own career, but another example is producing the final publishers draft of a novel by a given contractual deadline. In the military those sorts of deadlines were enforced, but when writing novels I have to enforce them myself and I find it helps if I set aside fixed times when I am going to write.

The other aspect is the quality of what I write. For me that is partly about practice, partly about knowing what I am going to write and partly being able to accept when something is good enough. Being dyslexic I can't do re-writes and self-editing is hard work, so I think things through in detail before I start writing. That means I avoid re-writes. Learing to accept when something is good enough was something else that the military enforced, given that orders must go out on time.

I wrote that for me quality of writing is partly about practice. You must write, otherwise you'll never develop your own style and you'll never learn what works for you. I started with short stories, because it was easier to finish things and easier to see what worked (or not). Short stories require much tighter writing to be good, so I also learnt how to structure things to give a good story arc and character development. I've also learnt that when I sit down to write then I ahve to write. Yes, that was enforced in the military but it has also helped me in writing stories - if I'm stuck on one story I'll write something else, because that way I always write something. What I write might not fit into the current story, but it will end up as part of a story.

 

[L.L. Maurizi]

I remember one day reading this quote by Voltaire, "Perfect is the enemy of Good", or something to that effect.

I think being a perfectionist is pretty common in what we do. What is far less common is being realistic and objective.
Is your work really as bad as you think? (same would be when we ask ourselves, is it really as good as we think).
Do you have issues in your writing? Prose, structure, ideas...

Finishing a page, then going back to it and marking it as bad, then starting over won't help you. Finishing a book or a chapter, or a short story, then improving it, having other people read it, change it... That will help.

Discipline comes with will. I feel that you'd have an easier time finding a good rhythm once you find a good drive.

I'm inclined to think you may be too harsh on yourself, but let's assume for the sake of argument that your writing really is bad. Then what can you do to make it better? How hard and long are you willing to work on it?

Being a perfectionist doesn't mean being happy only with the perfect. It means being focused on chasing perfection, knowing all too well that it's an impossible task, but an awesome driving engine.

To hell with perfect and create something good.

 

[skip.knox]

I think the word "perfectionist" is unhelpful at best. Consider: to be a perfectionist, you have to know what perfection is. I confidently contend that you don't know that. I certainly don't. Further, I'd argue that perfection is nonsense when it comes to art. So, begin by banishing that word.

You are, however, unhappy with what you write. That's fine. This happens to all of us. You have some suggestions from the posts above regarding how to address that. Just keep clearly in mind that it's a matter of getting to where you can accept what you have written. It's not about perfectionism.

Do you really hate what you write? That's sort of the other end of perfectionism. I can see being dissatisfied. I can see being worried that what you've written isn't very good and other people will criticize it, maybe severely. Perhaps you fear criticism?

I bring these things up because it's tough to fix a problem when the problem isn't clearly identified. If you can suss out what's really going on, you can deal with the issues one by one (it's often a tangle of factors rather than just one thing).

IMO, the time management issue is both easy and difficult. Easy in that there are a number of approaches and you can just try one after another until you hit on what works for you. Hard, in that life is constantly changing and what worked last Tuesday doesn't work today. And even harder because sometimes time management is more about motivation, or life distractions, or even health, than it is about just closing a door. All you can do is keep trying.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Don't compare yourself to people who write 2k words each day. You have to work up to those kinds of numbers. Sitting down and forcing yourself to write 2k words each and every day out of the blue is as sure a way to injure yourself as running a marathon without any practice. Aim for something you can manage.

A few things to consider.

The main one is that no time to write is a terrible excuse. It's about priorities. Of course, you can have a day or even a few days when things explode all over the place. But those are the exceptions. If you can find 2 blocks of 15 minutes in a day then you can write a (first draft of a) novel in a year. 15 minutes is taking a train to work earlier. Or skipping that 3rd episode for the day of whatever TV show you're watching. Or half a lunch break. I'll maintain that anyone can find 15 minutes in a day to write.

However, it comes down to mindset. If you sit down to write a novel, then 15 minutes is slow progress. No one can write a novel in 15 minutes. However, you can write half a page to a page in 15 minutes. So sit down to do that. Aim to write a page or a scene. It's why pmmg has such success with 1 sentence. Anyone can sit down to write a single sentence.

As for the quality of your writing. That's hard for us to judge without seeing it. It's also hard for you to judge by the way. Often when I'm writing I think everything I put on paper is terrible. However, if I come back to it a few weeks or months later, it's actually okay. And after I've edited I quite like it. There are a few things to consider here.

The main one is that writing is a skill. And skills take practice. Just like playing piano or tennis takes practice, so does writing. It takes 10.000 hours of dedicated practice to become an expert in something (though you become good enough a lot quicker...). So don't assume your writing will be prize winning if you're just starting out. Because that's never the case, even for the best writers. The Book of Lost Tales should be standard reading for Fantasy writers. It's a collection of the earliest writings of Tolkien. Not because it's good, but rather because it's pretty terrible. I love his published books. But in those early stories the writing is awful. You can see some of the ideas he uses in his published works, but the prose is nowhere near that level of quality. It's a great reminder that it takes practice to become better.

In the end, it all comes down to the question: do you want to dream about writing a novel or do you actually want to write a novel? If you actually want to write a novel, then you need to find 200 hours to write it in. And that means you have to give up something. It could be 30 minutes of playing a videogame each day. Or not watching 1 episode of a tv show each day. Or just getting up earlier 30 minutes or an hour.

I can give all sorts of tips how to help you progress further. But it starts with that. Deciding you want to actually write the novel and making time to actually do it.

 

[Finchbearer]

I think I like the process more than the finished project. When something is in theory ‘finished’, it’s never really finished. Therein lies the problem. If I say actually published a book, there would be no changes I could make, and that would knaw at me so much. It’s probably why I could never get a tattoo, or why I like rearranging furniture and painting the rooms different colours…

 

[Prince of Spires]

I think I like the process more than the finished project.

There is nothing wrong with that. If that's what you enjoy, do that.

You could always release a second edition, after you've published something...

Though for me finished means finished. At some point I've gone over it so much that I never want to touch it again. And I feel no compulsion to change stuff once it's published, other than the occasional typo. But that's just how my brain works.

 

[D. Gray Warrior]

I think the word "perfectionist" is unhelpful at best. Consider: to be a perfectionist, you have to know what perfection is. I confidently contend that you don't know that. I certainly don't. Further, I'd argue that perfection is nonsense when it comes to art. So, begin by banishing that word.

You are, however, unhappy with what you write. That's fine. This happens to all of us. You have some suggestions from the posts above regarding how to address that. Just keep clearly in mind that it's a matter of getting to where you can accept what you have written. It's not about perfectionism.

Do you really hate what you write? That's sort of the other end of perfectionism. I can see being dissatisfied. I can see being worried that what you've written isn't very good and other people will criticize it, maybe severely. Perhaps you fear criticism?

I bring these things up because it's tough to fix a problem when the problem isn't clearly identified. If you can suss out what's really going on, you can deal with the issues one by one (it's often a tangle of factors rather than just one thing).

IMO, the time management issue is both easy and difficult. Easy in that there are a number of approaches and you can just try one after another until you hit on what works for you. Hard, in that life is constantly changing and what worked last Tuesday doesn't work today. And even harder because sometimes time management is more about motivation, or life distractions, or even health, than it is about just closing a door. All you can do is keep trying.

You could be on to something. Perhaps it is a fear of criticism. That would be ironic as I try not to be the kind of person who can't take criticism.

I think I am trying to keep my own ego in check by accepting that what I write more than likely isn't as good as I think it is.

I believe my issue isn't not being able to accept criticism, rather the fear of being a hack. So, it's imposter syndrome.

 

[skip.knox]

Great! Getting more specific is good. Best (for me, anyway) is when I go ouch. That is, when my own analysis touches a nerve. Given how slippery is the human psyche, I don't look for truth in these matters, I just look for what resonates. What feels right. I also, but this is just me and is offered strictly FWIW, tend to shy away from any pre-packaged term. A phrase like perfectionist can be a way to start a conversation or an analysis, it's not a good place to stop. I try to think, what if I throw out that term, what if I never heard of something like imposter syndrome? OK, so *now* how do I look at this issue?

Anyway, lots of people will tell you that the feeling your best just isn't good enough, or that you're somewhere between mediocre and awful, and that this brutal truth will come to light when your next effort sees the light of day, that feeling never goes away. I've heard this from actors, painters, people from all sorts of professions. The best they can manage is to go ahead anyway.

Another set of people start out with that feeling, but after a series of successes (here defined as *not* being exposed as frauds) come to realize that if they aren't necessarily as good as many of their peers, at least their peers are roughly as lousy as they are. <smile>

The trick is to avoid letting the feeling stop you dead. Don't let it cause you to abandon the thing you want to do and leave you with a lifetime of regret that you never really tried. Missed chances are the essence of human tragedy.

 

[Finchbearer]

You could be on to something. Perhaps it is a fear of criticism. That would be ironic as I try not to be the kind of person who can't take criticism.

I think I am trying to keep my own ego in check by accepting that what I write more than likely isn't as good as I think it is.

I believe my issue isn't not being able to accept criticism, rather the fear of being a hack. So, it's imposter syndrome.

I think that perfectionism is often tied to low self-esteem or low self-worth, and that potentially is tied to fear of rejection / failure.

 

[skip.knox]

It may well be, but I don't find that (very common) analysis to be helpful. What's the person supposed to do? Hey, esteem yourself better! It's like giving writing advice of: write better.

As I tried to see in a previous post, I think "perfectionism" is a bit of a chimera. It's one of those words that get passed around as if we all understood it to mean the same thing, but is not, and anyway it's conceptually sort of impossible. It's natural and human to want to be better, to improve. Perfection is an ideal form, not a real one. Even when we look at something and declare it to be perfect, we really just mean it pleases us, we are satisfied with it. A person can work with that. They can strive to be satisfied or pleased. That lies within the realm of the human.

I don't mean any of that as a criticism. Shorthand terms have their uses, or we'd never finish a conversation. I just like to emphasize that they are indeed only shorthand, and that it can be fruitful to keep going beyond them.

 

[Finchbearer]

It may well be, but I don't find that (very common) analysis to be helpful. What's the person supposed to do? Hey, esteem yourself better! It's like giving writing advice of: write better.

I should know, I have low-self esteem which causes perfectionism no I don’t think it is always the root cause, but it can cause as far as I understand a fear of failure and rejection…

 

[pmmg]

How can one help another with their psychological roadblocks? Its just something that has to be overcome.

If only we all could get over the fear of rejection, or failure, or embarrassment... On the other side of that is a road to learning from our mistakes and becoming the thing that we are holding ourselves back for...more perfect. Or just plain better at it if Skip wants a different word.

We are always are own worst enemies. Its a strange part of being human, we beat ourselves up on the assumption others are waiting to do so instead, and others dont even notice or care about what we fret over. Its a strange type of insanity.