Writing Psychology Week Day Five: Discipline

Today is Red the Asshole Day, because today we’re going to talk about discipline. I’m sure this will be super fun. </sarcasm>

I spend a great deal of time telling you to create the space for inspiration to come to you rather than forcing the words out. Even so, there’s something to be said for daily writing. If you’re committed to your craft, daily practice will speed up your progress exponentially. Want to see how? Go to the beginning of my journal. Compare the writing to what you see in my recent posts.

Writing itself is not enough, of course. If you’re not learning from it, your growth curve will decline. That’s why I highly suggest using the workshop for feedback. I also recommend posting it on Fetlife. There are some magnificently sharp readers on this site, and if you interpret their engagement consciously, you can learn a great deal from them.

Are they offended? Rephrase.
Are they unresponsive? Rewrite.
Are they angry with you? Rethink.
Are they responding well? Repeat.

My mentor always taught me that if I didn’t have the inspiration to write a poem, I should write verse. What’s the difference? Well, poems are profound explorations that grow from inspiration. Verse is a technically correct piece of writing. More often than not, it won’t give you a publishable piece, but it will teach you some important technical skills. That way, the next time you’re inspired, you’ll be able to take as much as possible out of the experience.

Verse is simply trotting out the rhythm and rhyme of a structured poem—a villanelle, haiku, or sonnet, for example. If poetry is a painted masterpiece, verse is a colour-by-numbers exercise. You’re going through the motions in order to learn and grow more comfortable with your tools. If you find villanelles intolerable, you can also write verse based on other poets’ free verse. If you adopt the structure of another writer, you’re learning how they use their tools first-hand.

If you’re a prose writer, flash fiction is an excellent alternative to verse. If you’re uninspired, churn out a 100-word piece of microfiction, write a 50-word dribble or a 1,000-word piece of flash fiction. Write in bite-sized chunks so that you can hone your storytelling skills. Write morning pages

The 10,000 hour rule suggests that if you practice something for 10,000 hours, you’ll become an expert. It’s not an evidence-based number, but it does have an important lesson to teach. Learning takes work. It takes hours and hours of work. If you put in those hours, you will reap the rewards. The more you put in, the more you take out, so write words. Write words. Write words.