On Discipline and the Journey of Writing

I may have mentioned it before, but for a couple of years now, anytime I would meditate on my "Purpose" or the direction I should be taking in life (doesn't everyone do this periodically?), one word would float into my consciousness again and again...WRITE! Sometimes I would feel it so strongly it was like someone was screaming at me. Nothing else, no particulars, just "WRITE".

So for the entire stretch of 2004, that's just what I did. I stopped consulting, stopped coding, and just wrote. For the most part, I dabbled in different types of writing and different styles. I would try first-person essays, scripts, short stories, non-fiction. I would try fantasy, mystery, contemporary. I actually wrote quite a few personal essays, published none, and for all appearances, pissed away an entire year, supporting myself with the occasional technical piece that seemed to fall into my lap at just the write time.

But 2005 has started much differently. On December 15, 2004 (exactly one year to the day after I left my last big consulting gig), I wrote a contract with a writing coach / therapist, who I hired to help me get through this block I have of not finishing a damn thing. We agreed that I would write 4 hours a day, 6 days a week. If I was working or writing for pay, I would do that for 4 hours minimum, then write for 2 hours. But write what? Out of all the things I was working on, I picked a fantasy novel I'd been mulling for years.

There's the key: ONE project. One single project, four hours a day.

I just finished up my second month and I've long since come to realize that this project has nothing to do with writing a fantasy book. This is all about finishing something. It's a journey to an unknown and mysterious destination. But it's the journey, not that destination that counts.

The end goal is not to be published. It's not even a finished book. Hopefully these will come about naturally. But the goal is that journey. And like any other discipline, it doesn't matter what you do, it matters how you do it. I'm finding that the process itself is uncovering loads and loads of...stuff.

I read once that the key to absolute freedom is discipline. I didn't quite understand that at the time. For the great bulk of my life, I've had ZERO discipline. I was the classic flake, promising much, delivering nothing. I had a consistent pattern of letting down everyone in my life. Every company I worked at, every organization I volunteered with, friends, family members. I would bite off WAY too much and end up delivering none of it. I would just fall apart.

Then, as an experiment, I started staying with what I was doing. Toastmasters, for example. Reiki, as another example. Instead of dabbling and running, as was my standard operating procedure, I would stick around. Lo and behold, that's when things started to happen. I would hit that first obstacle, the one that usually drove me away. But instead of running, I would work through it. The form of this obstacle could be anything at all. But SOMETHING would always, always, always come up. That's just the way of things.

Later I began training at the gym consistently. I began studying kickboxing. Still later, after moving to the bay area, I began studying martial arts. I'm now coming up on 4 years at the same school. That's a long time for someone like me.

The crazy thing is that the same pattern happens no matter what I'm engaged in. I jump in, have a great time, play for awhile, then something comes up. I face it down, work through it, and suddenly find myself at another level of expertise, one I didn't know existed. You can't know it exists until you go there. And then I would play some more, having fun, until I hit the NEXT wall.

The walls keep coming. In fact, they get harder, not easier. But on the other side of every wall is a level of expertise I never knew existed. It just gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

It occurred to me at one point that it's much like digging a hole. Coming from Texas, the idea of drilling for oil comes to mind, though I prefer to think of digging a well. You can poke around here and there, digging a dozen, a hundred shallow holes. And each of these would be a different hobby or practice. But if you stick with one and go deep, as deep as deep can go, you eventually hit this massive underground reservoir. It doesn't matter which hole you pick or where you dig it, the reservoir is the same for all of them. The point is to just keep digging, staying with whatever hole you're working on.

This is not to say that discipline means digging yourself a hole. Rather it means persisting, getting through the layers of sediment and bedrock, until you find that natural, rich, life-giving spring.

Which brings me back to the writing. Even now, after all the journies I've been on, I kind of thought this would be about finishing a damn book. It's not. Not in the least. I've been crashing into one block after another. All the voices inside my head telling me what garbage it all is, what a talent-starved hack I am. The boredom that's really just fear in disguise. The endless distractions. The procrastinations. The rewrites, going back to the basic story again and again and re-visioning it so that I can start over from scratch. They're all obstacles on the journey. And the key is to see them for what they are.

Most recently, I not only stopped hitting my 4-hour mark, but I practically threw out what munged outline I'd been working on and started over. I seriously considered throwing out the 19 or so chapters I'd written thus far. But I recognized that as yet another way to sabotage myself, to run from this overwhelming insecurity I feel as an artist. And so I just picked back up with chapter 20. I made huge continuity gaps, deleting several characters, changing some circumstances in midstream. But instead of going back to chapter one, I'm determined to get all the way to the end. To see what's at the bottom of this hole. Then and only then, I'll go back to the start and begin the revisions.

My writing coach gave me a wonderful quote. I hope I remember it correctly: "When there's no wind, row." I've been rowing quite a lot lately, working through this novel. But every now and then the wind picks back up and sends me sailing. Those are beautiful moments. They remind me that, regardless of the outcome, I'm here for the journey.