About Discipline...

This picture hangs directly above my desk. It is one of my favorite passages from the book, Write Good or Die, written by several of my favorite authors. (This is a terrific book  by the way, and one I truly recommend to every fledgling writer.)

Kristine Rusch included this quote from Freya North in the chapter she wrote entitled The Freelancer's Survival Guide: Discipline. 

How often do we make up these very same excuses and promises to ourselves?? An instructor once told me that discipline is really what makes or breaks us. As a beginning freelance writer and author, there is no one standing over your head beating you up every day about getting that writing done and unless you are a bestselling writer, chances are, there never will be.

When I wrote my first novel five years ago, it was fairly easy to stay focused and write my two thousand words a day and still take the weekends off to relax. But life happens and circumstances change and today I find it much more difficult to get my work done in a timely fashion.

Perhaps it is the family issues that are occurring at this time in my life, or perhaps it simply age catching up with me. Either way, these "legitimate reasons" seem more like excuses than anything else, even to myself. 

Whatever it takes to motivate you every day, do it. There is no substitute for simply sitting your butt down and getting the work done...

Nuff said...