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Creating The Discipline to Do Your Art
There’s more than one way to make your art happen.
Some people do their art as a hobby. Others as a side-hustle. Then you get pros. When you do your art professionally, it’s important that you create a time and space to work.
Turning pro means that you create your art as your vocation. For me, that’s storytelling. As a writer, I wrestle words into sentences, paragraphs, pages, essays, stories, and even whole novels. While I’ve been a writer for most of my life, doing the work professionally has required me to discipline myself to do the work consistently.
Every author has their own discipline. What works for me might not work for you. If you have a full-time job but write part-time, you most likely need to overcome limitations in your time and energy.
Before I get into some of the options available for you to discipline yourself to do the work, let’s look at having enough discipline just to get started.
One step at a time
One of my favorite quotes by Lao Tzu is,
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
In our quick-fix, instant gratification world, it’s easy to ignore the necessity of a first step. There are all these examples of one-and-done success held up to us as how we should also be. Yet in truth, most of these were not instantaneous but instead the product of time, effort, and discipline.
In other words, they took steps. No journey of any sort, tangible or intangible, begins without taking that first step. Also, you don’t start that first step at a run, because you likely have no idea where to place your feet for the next step. So you must apply effort, time, energy, and discipline.
I’ve told more than one person who wants to be a writer that the first step is to put words on the page or screen. This begins with simple discipline. For some, this means writing a sentence a day. In time, you expand to a paragraph a day. After that, two paragraphs. Then a page.
That doesn’t mean if you feel like moving past your goal, you stop. Write on if you feel the call. My current daily writing goal is 1500 words of fiction. This can be the actual book, the plotting and planning, developmental work, or anything else in the world of fiction (versus this and similar nonfiction blogs, which don’t count toward my word count). I’m in the middle of writing book 2 in my next sci-fi series. I tend to write a chapter a day, which is frequently more than 1500 words. Hence, I had a 2500-word day recently.
Each step builds your discipline. Once you have that, then you can decide what that looks like for you.
Discipline is as variable as everyone is
There is no One True Way™ to apply discipline. This is super important to soak in. What works for me might not work for you due to differences in our environment, circumstances, space, time, and other variables. How one person applies discipline might not work for another.
Steven Pressfield goes into this in his brilliant The War of Art. He explains his discipline and process both directly and in some colorful metaphors. He writes extremely professionally, considering himself “at work” when he sets himself down at his desk to create – his fiction and nonfiction alike. He does his work until typos and tiredness start to stack up. After that, he takes a walk and allows his mind to make corrections (which he records so as not to lose them).
Some authors start at the same time every day. The clock strikes 9, just like any other office worker, you’re on the job. Some writers set timers and write for an hour without interruption. No bathroom breaks, no refilling coffee, just writing for that hour until the timer goes off. They usually take a break and then go at it for another hour.
I met author Timothy Zahn at Farpoint Con several years back. During a talk he gave, he told us he writes 1500 words a day. That resonated with me and has been my writing discipline ever since. I don’t do my work at a set time, but when I hunker down and write fiction, I aim to hit my 1500-word minimum. As mentioned before, I don’t stop when I get there but strive not to stop before. In this way, when I make my goal, I’m producing a minimum of 375,000 words a year. That’s more than 7 50,000-word books worth of words annually.
Accountability of discipline
To add to my discipline, I track how many days a week I meet my goal. I have 2 years of data along this line and have improved from one year to the next. In this way, I’m accountable to myself.
Being accountable might be easier for you if you have someone holding you to it. Some people are better with accountability when they have a trusted friend or confidant who helps keep them honest.
I have a whiteboard on my desk where I track the things I strive to be accountable for. This applies not just to my fiction writing, but also exercise, meditation, affirmations, journaling, editing, and water intake Monday through Friday. If I do poorly with any of these in a given week, I strive to improve them the next week. I only exercised on 3 days last week? I will push to get back to 5 this week.
Discipline isn’t worth much without accountability. Why? Because while the finished art you create is impressive, the process to make it happen along the way is moreso. Discipline to create your art, whatever form it takes, is tremendous and something to celebrate when you achieve it.
For blogs like this, my discipline is getting it posted by 9am EST. One blog every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Sometimes these are written the night before. Other times, an hour or less before I share. Accountability for me is you reading these words.
What your discipline to do your art looks like doesn’t have to be the same as mine. But if you desire to have regularity and frequency in your creative process, discipline is imperative. And it begins with a single step.
Thanks for reading. As I share my creative journey with you every week, please consider this:
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