Author's Notes on: Consistency and Discipline
Sticking to your guns
Hello everyone, and welcome back to regular free content on Author’s Notes!
It was a long December, and I’m very excited to show off all the content I’ve prepped in that time! You might be wondering why I opted to “take a break” without actually taking a break.
At the time of writing, I’m just over a year into writing for this blog, so I think I finally have some concrete words to say about consistency and the creative process. Let’s walk through this together:
I’ve touched on this a few times by now, but college was a rough time for me for a variety of reasons, but for the purposes of today’s article, I’m going to focus on the fact that for those years I was actively enrolled, I stopped writing.
It wasn’t conscious, but between the stress of classes, not having many friends (and the ones I did have being busy), and being away from home for the first time, I was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to strike a balance between that and doing the things I loved.
I still managed a little bit of it during the summers, but most of that was spent prepping books I’d already written for release on my Amazon, not writing anything new. There were only a few times during those years that I wrote anything at all that wasn’t an essay or a lab report.
And it was awful.
Writing is the love of my life, and without it, I was drowning. I was drowning, and still, my primary concern was finishing college. The real irony of that was the fact that the whole, you know, literally dying inside thing, really made it difficult to focus on school either.
…And then the world fell apart. School got messy. Life got messy. Eventually, I had to reassess my priorities and face the fact that destroying myself mentally and emotionally in order to get a job in which I could perpetuate that drowning machine for the rest of my life just wasn’t worth it.
Thus, the decision was made to concentrate on, well, breathing again.
That was when I started Author’s Notes, and, as mentioned, I’ve been writing consistently for it now for over a year. So, I think I finally have some concrete things to say about writing and consistency!
Coming Back From A Hiatus
After 3-4 years of barely writing at all, getting back into the swing of things was… in a word, rough.
Writing, like all other forms of creativity, is similar to a muscle, and in the words of my high school anatomy teacher, “If you don’t use it, you lose it!” If you’re coming off of a bout of writer’s block or just a dry spell creatively, it’s more than likely that it’ll be very obvious to you that you aren’t performing at your best.
This is not only okay, this is natural. If that’s hard to grasp, I sometimes find it’s easier for people to wrap their heads around the idea in physical terms. Let’s say you used to go to the gym fairly regularly, but ended up falling out of the habit for three years. Would you expect to be able to come back to the same weights or mile times you were pulling before? No! And if you did, you might even hurt yourself!
The principle is the same. Coming back from a hiatus, you’ve got to know that there’s every possibility you won’t consider what you make to be even palatable. I know I can feel the stark difference between early articles on Author’s Notes to current ones! You’ll get back to those metaphorical 6-minute miles and benching big numbers, but you have to start somewhere — even if that’s wheezing on the floor after one lap.
You quite literally have to train your creativity, and you’ve got to do it consistently if you want to get better.
Training Consistently
As I’m sure is no surprise to any returning readers, I will always advocate that you train and define consistency in the way that best suits you, your style, and your life. Your experience should always be tailored to what suits you best and may mean that you need to try out some options that don’t work initially.
For some of you, you might find a lot of mileage out of writing every single day, even if it’s just a few paragraphs. You’d be surprised how quickly sentences and paragraphs add up! For others, writing every day might not be an option at all.
Personally, I don’t write every single day, but I do set hard deadlines every week that I keep to very closely. I’m the type of person who doesn’t form habits very easily, and if I miss even one day, I’ll end up missing two, then three, until my entire schedule falls apart.
That’s part of why December wasn’t a vacation for me. If I took all of December off, I’d completely lose my rhythm! So, I tricked my brain by continuing to work on my normal schedule even though Author’s Notes wasn’t seeing any actual posts.
I do best with a mix of just enough time to gather my thoughts but not enough to procrastinate into oblivion. While I don’t write every single day, I am writing at a pace that consistently puts out a chapter every Friday, not to mention free content and additional art or worldbuilding.
But I didn’t know that when I first started! All I knew was that I needed to train. I went through several scheduling changes over the past year to find this one, but I think the project that really helped me the most was The Cardinal Directive.
The Cardinal Directive
If I was ever going to get back into the swing of things, I knew I was going to need a series I could consistently work on and post — something with a lot going on for me to sink my teeth into and explore. And, moreover, something with a lot of themes that I enjoyed exploring in the first place!
And so, The Cardinal Directive was created — a zombie-apocalypse, sci-fantasy nightmare on Mars. It started coming out consistently every Friday (then every other Friday, after it began sharing its timeslot with Sleepless), and it’s been a part of this blog ever since.
What makes the series so fascinating in hindsight is that reading through it start to finish, you can literally watch as I go from a writer who had been 3-4 years out of practice, to someone who has been writing consistently and rather extensively for over a year. You can read and see my progression of getting more confident with the material, with handling its themes, and getting a clearer idea of where I wanted to take our story and how.
Without Cardinal, none of this would have been possible. It’s far from the cleanest thing I’ve ever written, but it is tons of fun and I feel my interest and passion for creating this strange and awful alternate history Mars really shows.
So, if you’re coming back from a hiatus and need something to help you train, I absolutely recommend picking up a passion project. You don’t need to post it the way I do with Cardinal — all it needs to do is exist for you. Make it weird! Put in all the stuff you’ve always wanted to write about! But most importantly, make it fun. This is something you should feel excited to work on. It should motivate you to be consistent and train your brain, not be a slog or chore.
Other Options
If taking on a big project is intimidating, you don’t have to do that at all! The point isn’t the material, it’s the fact that you’re making something on a consistent basis and getting your brain and creative muscles working!
You could treat it much more formally as a training exercise, challenging yourself to do something in X amount of words, or deciding to work on a particular skill, like your descriptions, and finding something to describe in great detail. You could people-watch and write a paragraph as though in the mind of someone you saw. There’s no end of possibilities for this!
For example, another creative thing I do is play Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve been playing in various tabletop RPGs and groups for several years now, with a variety of characters, as I’ve talked about in my article on Writing Character Guides. My games are online, meeting regularly over voice chat, but also having play-by-post/text-rp components too.
Everything about D&D, from creating a character, interacting over voice chat and text with a group, and being a part of a story, is perfect for fostering your capabilities as a writer! I know I got much better at writing dialogue and banter between characters from watching and being a part of it in my games.
As always, there are many ways to go about this, and I encourage you to search around for what works for you!
Discipline
Aaaand here’s the not-so-fun part.
Consistency is hard. Maintaining consistency is hard. Consistency means setting and sticking to schedules and both actively and passively investing in your personal betterment. The more you do it, the easier it will get to keep doing it, but you have to conquer the hurdle of actually doing it.
Consistency requires discipline.
Something I don’t see talked about enough is the fact that big creative projects aren’t entirely dependent on your abilities as a writer, artist, or whatever else you consider yourself. They involve project management skills, like planning schedules, allocating your own mental and physical resources, and making deadlines.
All of these things require self-discipline to consistently get where you want to be with your creative ventures, and to get better at them, you’re going to have to practice self-discipline just like you’d practice with consistency. You’ll have to teach yourself that if you do something like set a deadline, you stick to it.
You can do this by rewarding yourself in ways big and small, but the ultimate goal is to be able to stick to your guns even without an external reward, because you want to get to a point where the lack of reward doesn’t kill your motivation or willingness to get things done.
Having the discipline to stay consistent is instrumental in making regular progress on your projects, and you’d be fascinated to see how fast consistency will start to make your efforts add up.
Discipline and consistency can be hard skills to learn, but they’re massively useful not only for your creative ventures, but also for use in your daily life. The ability to intrinsically motivate yourself can make it possible for you to complete just about any basic task you’re liable to run into.
Train these skills and invest in self-discipline to see both inner and outward self-betterment! Find what works for you, stick to your guns, and you’ll be seeing your progress add up in no time.
Thank you all for reading! That’s all for today!