“How do you build discipline into your writing without crushing spontaneity?”

I had to ponder that question for a while? Indeed, I suspected the person who asked it had gone to ChatGPT and requested “intellectual questions to ask writers.”

So, after giving it much thought and parsing the sentence, here’s what I think.

Discipline is critical in writing and about writing. You accomplish nothing if you don’t put your derriere in the chair or your fingers on the keyboard (or pen) and actually, you know, write. I’ve often told the story of how I retired from my government job to write what I wanted for myself. That first year of retirement I had to get accustomed to the fact I didn’t have to get up at 0430 to make an 0700 staff meeting, and I spent a lot of time doing . . . nothing.

That wasn’t the plan, of course, and I’m a pilot; I like a plan and a checklist. However, I didn’t do much writing that first year of retirement. I was babysitting a grandson, getting involved in local politics, buying a house, packing up my old house, and selling that house. Not to mention, it felt good not to have anything I really had to do. I suppose you’d call it decompressing.

But when NaNoWriMo 2010 came around, I realized I needed to do that writing that was the purpose of my retirement. I established a discipline of writing every day: a couple hours in the morning, sometimes again in the afternoon. That was exactly what my Type A brain needed. Structure. A plan. Discipline.

Since the asker of the question above apparently had the impression that discipline destroys spontaneity, let me opine on that. In the soon to be 17 years since my retirement, I’ve worked on at least a dozen manuscripts I started during my full-time job and had to abandon them because “full-time job.” Those have all been published, and some have won awards as well as came close to being a number one bestseller. I also wrote from “scratch” at least 10 original novels, most of which have been published. Let’s not forget short story collections, short stories for numerous anthologies, novelettes, and novellas. I call that spontaneity.

The biggest bit of spontaneity that discipline engendered, I think, was switching genres from historical espionage fiction to mysteries. And I never could have accomplished that with some success–two published, one an international prize winner, one in the second draft stage–without . . .

[DRUM ROLL]

Discipline.

The kind of discipline where if you set a pattern of writing every day, even if it’s only a few paragraphs, you develop not only a continuing discipline but also the habit of writing. That’s why I carry a laptop (or a notebook) with me every where I go. If I go even a couple of days without writing, I start jonesing for it, and what I do write arises in my brain spontaneously.

As I’ve said for other reader-asked questions, this is what works for me, but I also think that if you don’t have the discipline to write every day, you won’t develop the habit of writing every day. I’m the kind of writer who looks forward to what my brain spontaneously produced, and I also know that if I didn’t have the discipline to do this every day, I’d be just another insipid, bland writer lacking spontaneity, too.

Stephen King said it better: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work . . . . Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine until noon or seven until three.”

King also disciplines himself by setting a target for each day: six to 10 pages or roughly 2,000 words. Thirty days of that, and you’ve got a rough draft of a novel.

I’d reframe the question like this: “How do you keep from crushing your spontaneity without building your discipline?”