Keeping the Discipline 1

One of the things which has really stuck with me is Brandon Sanderson saying that good writing is about practice.  According to him, just like any skill, becoming good is just a matter of continual practice practice practice.  This is unsurprising given that writing, like anything else, is just a skill.  There is no magic, there is no undiscovered rituals.  If you want to be a better writer, you just have to sit down and start hammering out words.

Of course, I heard this little bit of wisdom over a year ago and have only just recently started doing it.  I had a full time job, a toddler, and I’m the primary cook, so I simply didn’t have the time to commit to the craft.  Well, as my introduction has explained, I’ve recently quit my job, so now I have the time.  I truly truly do.

But wait, I was unemployed for quite some time before getting this job, so why didn’t I start writing back then?  The truth is, I have no idea.

After my injury, I ended up spending a good deal of time in physical rehabilitation.  This took enough time out of my week that getting a job was impractical.  So, instead, I went and got a masters degree, because why the hell not?  Still, after my degree and after my rehab finished, I was unemployed for the better part of a year.  So what was I doing with my day during that time?

Again, I have no idea.  I do know that I’ve watched every episode of several series available on Netflix, so that may explain a lot of it.  I also have hundreds of hours invested in Civilization V and Skyrim,  Yeah, okay, I do know what I was doing with my time: wasting it, albeit in a fun way.

So, when I finally sat down and decided to go full-tilt into this writing gig, I was determined to not let myself flounder into letting my days drift away in an unproductive haze.  After two solid years of slogging through eight hours a day at a crappy job, there’s no way I’m going to go back to doing nothing.

Therefore, I made a schedule.  Yes, I made a daily schedule with 8 hour workdays broken into blocks of writing and other stuff.  It’s day two of that schedule, as of writing this, and it’s going pretty great.

The goal is to work 8 hours every weekday.  This seems not only feasible, but completely reasonable.  Every day, nearly 4 hours of those 8 are devoted 100% to writing.  The other time is broken up day by day, including some dedicated time for working on this blog (if I don’t dedicate the time, I’ll let this slip).  This means that there is little excuse for me not getting at least 2000 words written every day, less any necessary at the beginning and end of a particular project for outlining or editing.  Yesterday, I got 3200 finished, and today another 2000 and finished the first draft of a short story.  So far, it’s working great.

Making a schedule and keeping it prominent (I threw it into Google Calendar, so now even my lock screen tells me what I should be doing right now) is very helpful for keeping me on task.  If I let myself lose this 8 hour day discipline, I know I may never get it back.  And that is unacceptable.

Now, I wonder if I should schedule in some specific time for tweeting…