Discipline

Last weekend at the NEC conference, I attended a workshop on writing YA with Mari Mancusi. It was all good info for those who wish to write for the YA market, but I’m not really here to talk about that right now. (Sorry!)

I tend to think that when I go away to a conference, if I can come back with at least one good piece of information, one potentially career-changing bit of advice, then it was worth the price of admission. At this conference, one came from Marianne. (Go on, Mari, feel smug.) It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, nothing I didn’t already know on a certain level, but it was something I needed to hear now.

She said she wrote every day. She said you have to, even a little bit. “Writing is like a muscle,” said Marianne. “You have to use it or lose it.”

I know this. I’ve said it before to people. I’m a card-carrying member of the Sacred Order of “Writers Write.”

Or maybe I’m a lapsed member. Because I hadn’t written for a month. Not a word. Blog posts, sure, and some revisions, and some faffing around with brainstorming/plot boards/synopses, etc. But not actually sitting down and putting new words on new pages that moved the story forward. And I can say it’s because I’ve been dealing with some pretty rotten personal stuff, or because I was doing first and second page proofs for Under the Rose, or because I went out of town FOUR times in March… but that’s all bullshit.

Because Writers Write.

On one of my writing loops, the members challenged themselves to something called 100 for 100. They promised to write at least 100 words every day for 100 days. 100 words is NOTHING. You can do 100 words of crap even on your busiest, worst, blocky day. And at the end of 100 days, you’ll have 10k, which is almost a complete proposal. And I was all gung-ho: “Great idea! I’m so in!” And then I totally wussed out.

But sitting there, in a conference room in Natick, MA last week, I listened when Marianne said that you need to write every day, even if it’s just a little bit.

And I went home, and I started to write. The first day was awful, a lot of crap and deletions and “my lord, when did I stop being funny?” But at the end, I had three pages. The next day, I had five more. Then eight more. Today, I’m going for ten. Because it is like a muscle. The more I use it, the better I get.

Will there be backslides? Sure. I already see parts of the plot ahead of me that I know I’m going to wrestle with. I don’t expect my daily output to keep going up. I know this about my writing. In the past, I’ve been a feast-or-famine writer. I’ll go months where I write like a fiend, followed by months of no writing at all. And every time I “reboot” it starts slow, and then I get better and better, until I top out at a maximum daily output. (I know what this is because I chart it, because I’m a big dork and if it works for people training for a marathon, why can’t it work for me?)

And every time I get into a good groove, I say, like anyone who has been exercising, “Wow, this feels good. I should do this every day. I’m going to make an effort not to stop, because starting again sucks.” And then I do stop, and I have to start over again.

I’m not a disciplined writer. So here I am, making a public promise to become more so. I’m not Rachel Vincent, who can actually set a per day word count that she wants to reach. Any word count will do for me right now. Marianne can do it with a full time job. I should be able to do it without one.

I read a great quote the other day, from Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage):

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

I’m going to take those words to heart. I’m going to write every day this month: the days that are Easter, the days I’m away at a writing retreat, the days when I have nothing good to say, the days when I’m so incredibly busy that I can’t think straight, the day my taxes are due. I’m going to write. (It may mean I won’t blog, but we all have to make concessions.) It’s April, and I’m writing.

Who is with me?