TL;DR – it’s been a shitty year but now I am writing a new book.
Oldest child and rule follower that I am, self-motivation and self-discipline have typically not been an issue for me. This year, however, has been a very notable exception. Going into 2024, I was writing consistently, had a thrice-weekly gym class routine I rarely strayed from, and was consistently querying agents and publishers for my latest completed manuscript.
Then in late January, I started experiencing tailbone pain, which led me into a medical mystery I wish were fiction, and not something I’m still living with 10 months later. It’s a long story and I’m still writing about it, but what it meant for me was that the discipline of writing became all but impossible. My entire adult life, I have always done my writing at night, especially after my twins were born, because between kids and a full-time job, it was the only time I had.
The year crawled by, with much of it spent waiting for surgery and very little writing. I finished a couple poems and a couple short stories (and got one published – yay!) but told myself it wasn’t worth starting a new novel until I had dedicated writing time where I could sit every day without pain. When surgery and recovery came and went, and I was still experiencing pain, I felt like I might as well just give up.
There’s a bookstore I love in Bastrop, TX called The Painted Porch. It’s owned by Ryan Holiday, a guy who’s made a career out of studying and espousing Stoic philosophy. I’m not a big non-fiction reader, and even less of a self-help reader, but I stumbled across Ryan Holiday’s books on my library’s Libby app and decided to check one out because A) all my holds were still showing a nice long wait B) I love The Painted Porch and C) because I enjoyed Philosophy 101 enough to learn more about the Stoics.
The book I checked out was called Discipline is Destiny, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that this sort-of-self-help book drawing on principles of Stoic philosophy changed my life. Holiday hooked me immediately with the “clean your desk” message as the very cluttered desk where I used to write (before my year of pain) stared back at me. I expected to hear about the discipline of the most famous Stoic philosophers and elite athletes (and I did), but did not expect to hear about the discipline behind two of my literary heroes – Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates – who got up early every morning to write before they went to their day jobs and took care of their children.
Y’all, it never even OCCURRED to me that instead of waiting until I was pain-free and energetic enough to write in the evening after I got my kids off to bed, I could just get up early and write in the morning when my mind and my body were fresh instead. It sounds crazy now that I needed a book to tell me that, but it’s a testament to just how rigid we can get in our thinking and our daily routines that we keep doing the same thing even when it’s not working for us – a trap I fall into more often than I’d like. But as I recently learned, it’s a core tenet of Stoic philosophy: we can’t control our circumstances, but it’s our duty to control how we respond to them.
My getting back to discipline is still a work in progress. Faced with the prospect of getting up to write or getting an extra hour of sleep, there are still mornings where sleep wins. And sometimes I will sit and stare at the screen for a good 8 minutes before writing a single word. Some mornings I only manage to write a handful of sentences. But I’m doing the work, doing my best to avoid the snooze button, and I’m now closing in on the 3rd chapter of a new novel because of it. Discipline is a practice, and the more I do it, the better I am at it… especially with a clean desk.
Maybe there’s something to this self-help genre after all… but I’d still rather read ghost stories.
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