Motivation vs discipline

AKA whatever it takes to get your bum on the seat

If I only wrote when I felt like it, I would never write. Or at least almost never. There is always something to do that’s more pressing, that’s easier than writing. I work for myself, by myself. Nobody observes what time I enter my office, if I enter it at all. Nobody asks how many words I’ve written that day. Sometimes I start work at 3pm. Some days I don’t work at all.

I’ve been writing fiction pretty much constantly for seven years now. I’ve never not been working on a book. My fourth is about to be published. I have written with a full-time job, a part-time job and no other job. When I got my book deal, I asked my agent if she thought it would be a good idea to quit my job and write full-time. She said no. She said that her clients who wrote full-time were no more prolific than the ones who had day jobs. I thought that was crazy: how could that be the case?

A few years later I see exactly how that’s the case. Time is deceptive when you write full time. You have more of it, and what happens when you have an abundance of something? Waste. When all you have to do with your day is write, you end up scraping hours into the compost bin, except they can’t be broken down and recycled. They’re just gone.

When I worked as a journalist, my office hours were 10-6 five days a week. I would come home, make dinner and write until about 9, and I set aside a half-day or a few hours on the weekends. This apparently limited schedule was startlingly productive. I wrote The Foundling this way, and at some point I dropped a day at work so I had an extra weekday to write. This became necessary because I was pretty much working seven days a week, either in the office or on my book, and resentment began to creep in. Spending a weekday on my book freed up the weekend, or some of the weekend, for things that weren’t work.

During this time I published three books in three years. I worked a day job for two of these. And then I went full-time as a writer, and now there will be three years between my third and fourth books. How? I don’t know. I write slower. The process is more drawn-out. I doubt I’ll ever be able to match the energy I had as a newly published writer again. The compost bin glares at me from the corner of my shed.

I wouldn’t describe myself as self-motivated or disciplined, and so I struggle with the job that I have. But a real breakthrough I had was learning the difference between motivation and discipline. One is reliant on several external factors: mood, environment, deadlines, where you are in your manuscript. It’s impossible to conjure motivation from nowhere. Discipline, however, doesn’t care how you feel, or what the weather is, or how many conversations are lighting up on Whatsapp. Discipline is just application: showing up no matter how you feel. Kind of like going to the gym, though I wouldn’t know, because I don’t.*

Separating the feelings I have about writing from the writing itself has become transformational to both my writing itself and my relationship with writing. It makes things less complicated. It is far better to turn up at your desk and write something, anything, than put it off for a week because you need everything surrounding the act of writing to be perfect. They will never be perfect. There is no perfection when it comes to writing. Just because I have a clear inbox, a fully belly, a warm shed, a hot cup of tea and my writing playlist on low in the background doesn’t mean that what I write will be any better or easier than the day I felt a cold coming on, twenty things needed doing around the house and I forgot to heat the shed so had to work at the kitchen table with everyone indoors.

I reframe “I don’t feel like writing today” to “I am working today”. Of course I have seventeen tabs open, check my phone regularly and wander inside at regular intervals to make a brew. I still procrastinate (just one more load of washing then I’ll go outside!). But now I work as if I have an appointment to keep, which I do. I have stopped tallying my daily word count because I can’t write 2000 words a day anymore; I’m lucky if I write half that. Part of discipline is knowing your limits: it is not drawing blood from a stone.

My routine is I don’t really have one. I don’t work well creatively in the mornings; I prefer to send emails and do admin. In the afternoon, when the day has done its warm-up stretches and I’ve had lunch, that’s when I generally sit down to write. Between 2pm and 5pm are my best hours. Discipline does not have to mean waking at 6 and starting work at 7. It can mean making the most of the time you are naturally productive.

Maybe now I’ll get that gym membership, because now I’ve made the distinction, I really have no excuse.

A recommendation: one of my favourite writers on time is Oliver Burkeman. His book Four Thousand Weeks, about the fallibility of time management, is both inspiring and comforting, as is his newsletter The Imperfectionist.

Next week: how to write a trash draft.

*Edit: I wrote this piece towards the end of 2023 – yes, I was quite organised – and it made me realise that I could apply this model to the gym. And I did! I joined up shortly after and have been going a few times a week ever since I separated the feelings from the thing. It would seem I have taken my own advice, and if I can exercise regularly (I literally did voluntary community service at secondary school instead of PE), you can write a novel.