How self discipline failed to motivate me, but freedom did.

Although discipline is extremely important when it comes to writing a novel I often find that forced self-discipline is more detrimental to my writing than it’s supposed to be. Sometimes I set myself goals on how many words I should be writing a day, I figure this is one of those that a lot of writers do because it enforces a strong sense of work habit which is essential in any job. Even when you don’t feel like writing something, you should still do it, especially if it’s something very time consuming like writing a book or an article. It makes perfect sense but unfortunately that doesn’t mean it works well for everybody. Some of us, I guess, just aren't very good at self discipline. Either way, I had a good crack at knuckling down and organizing myself. I decided to start with small goals as a sort of confidence boosting exercise; 500 words a day seemed a pretty reasonable place to start even though I knew I was more than capable of writing well over 3000 a day. I decided to set myself 500 words a day because it was an easily achieved task that wouldn’t dampen my spirit too quickly as I knew I was well within my own ability to meet that goal. Looking back, maybe that was the problem; I was being too soft on myself and not providing enough challenge. Rather than pushing to get it done it was kind of a 'eh, it's only 500 words, I can do it whenever'. Despite it being an overly easy task the idea was was that it allowed for a continuous progression of the story. Previously I'd been working on a stop and start mechanism of hours upon hours of writing followed by two weeks of not even sniffing it. So the goal made sense, didn’t work though.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really, I don't, but as soon as I have to do something I subconsciously refuse to do it out of what can only be stubbornness. I guess I do know what's wrong with me... I’m pretty sure I've become one of those irritating people that likes to do things when it’s their idea but will be resistant towards it if it’s somebody else’s. In this situation, the ‘somebody else’ was actually just me, or rather a ‘past me’ completely separate to ‘current me’. In the least sense of dissociative identity disorder way possible, this is how I see stuff. ‘Past me’ had unfairly forced my creativity onto a factory belt whilst expecting me to meet my daily quota and I just wasn’t going to play ball with this new state of affairs. It kind of reminded me of being in the call centre where, if you didn’t meet certain specifications and quotas, then you were in big trouble.  “Treat me like a novel writing machine, will you.” I silently seethed, playing video games, “fuck you, I’ll write when I’m ready to write.” This went on for a couple of days before I felt the all-encompassing guilt of being a lazy low-life so I reluctantly opened up the document and had a crack of writing my quota. It was uh... awful, actually. I swear, I have never struggled so much to string together a few decent sentences in my life. Apart from when I was doing my Philosophy degree, that was all struggle, but creative writing is my turf and it's always been a fairly productive past time for me. Even though in this little session I wrote well over the 500 word quota, reading back, it wasn’t great. Ok, it wasn’t just ‘not great’ it was crap; dull, uninspiring gap filling drivel that desperately needed to be destroyed. So, after taking a break to get my act together a little, I spent at least two hours that essentially consisted of repairing the literacy mess I’d just tagged on the end of my otherwise acceptable chapters. When it was all over, I didn’t open the book again for another few days. I haven’t been writing blog posts because the same sort of situation applies to most things in my life, if I’m not enthusiastically inspired then I struggle to get the cogs turning and I end up burrowing myself in a rabbit warren of… oh, I don’t know, procrastination and mud, and twitter.

What actually solved my severe case of writer’s block didn't involve opening up my novel or doing flow charts on paper, rather, just thinking about it. Surprisingly, when you’re unable to write down your thoughts by keeping yourself away from pen and paper it means that your ideas and thoughts can come a lot faster and everything gets a little ecstatic because you have to work harder. By thinking up some conversational, plot driven scenes that I thought would it well it got me excited to write again because I really wanted to get to that point where I could tie everything together. I had one opening sentence in my mind, a spoken sentence by a character and an hour later when I got near my pc I sat down and I wrote that sentence in an empty, new document. After that, everything flowed. 2000 words later I had a new scene to be inputted at a later date and a whole host of ideas on how to connect A to B. Even better, I just completed my word count quota for today by writing this blog post. Happy Valentine’s day folks :D