In order to stay consistent with anything requiring self-discipline (yes, like fiction writing), you need to avoid immature rigidity. This means being inwardly and outwardly flexible enough to keep going when life puts inevitable obstacles in your path. But it’s also about love.
For example, this morning everything went horizontal. I had to deal with something stressful the moment I got up. By the time I sat down to write, a large amount of my writing time had already been lost. I did what I could and went on my brief morning run, but my legs hurt so much from the elliptical work yesterday that my run was pathetic.
Then I came back to meditate, which usually ends my morning routine. Only I couldn’t get to it because something else was demanding my attention. I didn’t meditate at all. I sat at my computer, chatting with a roleplaying game designer friend in a different time zone and saying it’s all going to be okay. Because it is. Everything works out. What we’re really afraid of is the emotional trauma between here and there, which is ultimately nothing.
I closed the laptop and started laughing at my stupid frustration. I thought: “Fuck it.”
Sometimes, you have a fuck it morning. The good news is that I managed to write later, on my lunch break—not as much as I normally do, but I got my minimum page for the day. I went to the gym after work, got back on the elliptical, and read a fair amount of fiction on my Kindle, while climbing an invisible mountain surrounded by the usual baby mamas in halter bras and gym bros with bad tattoos.
The place smelled particularly bad, a heady funk of body odor and basement mildew. Still, I felt happy, like I’d redeemed the day; though, I know it’s not about any one day, whether I did or didn’t meet my quotas, exercise my discipline, and practice my work bushido.
It’s what I do consistently. And it’s whether I can do that with love in my heart—for the world, for my silly life, for my humble day job, for my never-ending art, for myself, and for you, Jack Kerouac.
The world will get in your way if you want to do anything well, which means regularly. Can you learn to enjoy that kind of trouble? It can be enjoyable. This is never more true than with writing, which depends so often on the ability to enter a highly receptive state at will.
Sometimes, you just can’t “take it to the place,” as a friend of mine used to put it. Those are valuable experiences. You can learn a lot from them if you stay awake to what’s going on in your head. But most of the time, you’ll be able to take it to the place if you can manage to love the process, relax, stop regarding yourself so seriously, and come down off your stained-glass high horse.
It’s hard for me to choose love instead of my immature, rigid, discipline-optimized parti-colored high horse. But that’s my self-work, my meta-work. It’s the work that makes the other work possible. As the sage, Oliver Bateman, is so fond of saying, that’s doing the work. (Though I have pointed out to him many times that, just as often, the work does you.)
So the fundamental technique of getting half a loaf instead of none becomes one of flexibility and perspective. You need to have a kind of inner looseness that keeps your frustration in check. It’s what prevents your day from getting completely derailed when something doesn’t go right. It’s what prevents you from getting completely derailed when nothing goes right.
You might not sleep well or there might be an emergency or you might just be very tired or more tired than you anticipated being. Maybe your legs hurt. Maybe you get a text from a roleplaying game designer in a deep fugue of impostor syndrome. Staying emotionally (and physically) flexible allows you to dance through those times and learn from them. It helps you maintain consistent work in long arcs.
Cultivating a broad perspective of yourself and your work also helps you stay awake. You’re not making the performance of any single day or morning dispositive of anything. Nothing that small and brief can be the sole indicator of your performance as a writer or in any other respect. You’re just dancing. You’re taking it to the place. You’re saying, I’ll pick it back up at lunch.
It’s not even about endurance; though, so many writers grind out daily pages like they’re on a death march. It’s about being in the moment, being present with what you have to do right now, today, even if you’re having a fuck it morning. And then it’s recognizing that absolutely nothing is being decided by what did or did not just happen. Rather, habitual practice is what decides everything. That and how much affection you can feel for the gift of every minute.