Habits are so dang difficult, aren’t they? All the will in the world, and you still can’t just MAKE yourself Do The Thing that you actually really want to do.
It’s terribly frustrating.
Hence my lil grid of boxes at the back of my diary for the year, a tiny incentive to nudge myself onward every time it feels especially HARD to get to the novel and actually write.
Not that any kind of bribery works for long. I have a bunch of virtual post-its up on one of my desktops, and a handful of them all revolve around the same idea: that fundamentally, when you come down to it, you can only bribe yourself for so long.
Actually Derek Murphy put it nicely in a newsletter once. In essence, he noted, your creativity is like a feral cat. You can’t tame it, you can’t force it to do anything it doesn’t want to do… But you can feed it. You can train it into a habit by showing up, every day, at the same time, with something that it wants.
You can’t tame your soul, and it will only put up with bribery for so long.
But you can feed it.
Mostly, in my experience and in the experience of a bunch of other talented artists across a wide range of fields, all of whom have been practising their art for a lot longer than I have, it comes down to PLAY. PLAY with your art. Don’t force it. Make it somewhere fun, focus on how it makes you feel – and focus on how you’re GOING to feel when your art-making session is over.
I wrote out a schedule a couple of nights ago. You know how I was all, hey, I should be able to write much faster now that my brain isn’t constantly being eaten, so assume one book a year but ALLSSOOOO HYPOTHETICALLY if I wrote for an hour a day six days a week fifty weeks a year I could write four and a half novels a year….
Yeah okay so of course I caved and drafted up a schedule of What Things Would Look Like if I actually DID write four novels a year.
And, 1) wow, it’s still going to take a LONG time and a LOT of work to get all the books I’m dreaming of done, but 2) making this whole authoring thing financially viable will DEFINITELY a) take time and b) take LESS time if I actually write more often, and 3) OMG now that I’m finally waking up again after burnout I have space to emote more than just ‘urgh, tired’, and I want this. I want this so damn much.
And so forcing myself to get to the computer to write is getting easier, because I’m playing (I realised a week ago I was bored with the novel, so I brainstormed and browsed for random inspiration on Pinterest and ended up throwing in a gorgeous glowing tree that sets up a key conflict for the NEXT book amazingly well, yay!) and because I’m focusing on the long-term results that I want and how that’s going to feel (instead of focusing on the feeling of resistance when trying to get to Scrivener) and because – shockingly enough – habit building is a practice, and it gets easier the more you do it.
All of which is to say, a few weeks ago I was laughing at having to be sensible, aiming for one 15 min writing sprint a day as a kind of stretch goal.
Well, I’m there. The one-a-day has become baseline, and now I’m stretching some days for two.
And guys?
It feels really, really good.