Success seemingly comes naturally to some people. But looks are deceptive: underneath every swan gracefully swimming upstream is a pair of feet frantically paddling.
Before I took ill with late-onset bipolar disorder, I was on the road to a successful legal career and personal life.
But even then there was a problem: I would get easily bored with a short attention span and certain areas of my life were un-disciplined and frankly chaotic. I managed to hold it together (on the whole) by ensuring the fundamentals were attended to, but once I became ill, these too became relatively chaotic, and my life began to slide into an abyss.
When I took up screenwriting I realised that to maintain balance I needed to impose a contained writing regimen on myself and so I determined that I wouldn’t write for more than two hours a day.
Now, two hours might not seem like much, but when you are writing from an outline I can write five pages of a script in two hours. If you write five pages every day, you can punch out the first draft of a 110-page script in a month.
The key is to turn up every day, no matter what. I can’t remember what writer scoffed when he was asked how hard it was to find inspiration, that he found inspiration every day when he sat down at his desk and started typing at nine o’clock every morning without fail.
Equally, Steven King once explained that he wrote every day without fail except for Christmas Day and his birthday. Later in an interview, he corrected himself: he had meant to say that he wrote every day, including Christmas day and his birthday.
One necessary key to success, then, is discipline. In my youth and young adulthood, despite my friends’ protestations that I was bound to be successful, my talent was largely squandered because I had no discipline.
And talent without discipline is like energy without an engine.
When you write, if you wait for the muse to inspire you, you will be waiting a long time, and you will be watching daytime TV and shoveling in nachos (other sofa snacks are available) rather than structuring your stories or perfecting your dialogue.
One thing I am sure of is that I never have writer’s block, and intend to keep it that way. The key to writer’s block is simple. No matter how flat and uninspired you feel about your writing, sit down at your desk and promise yourself you are going to write for ten minutes.
It doesn’t matter what you write – you can write anything, even if it’s gobbledygook – but the point is you will be very unlucky if you don’t get into a stride during that ten minutes.
As an example, I didn’t really feel like writing up this post this morning, and the TV beckoned. But I bypassed the telly, fired up my laptop, and wrote my introduction.
Almost immediately words began to form and the creative juices began to flow.
So, discipline begets success. Of course, balance is important, too. No one is expecting you to be as disciplined as a stylite or a Garrison Sergeant-Major.
Discipline is coming easier for me these days. That is partly because I lost fifteen years of my life to my illness, and, as a man now in his fifties, I have less time to squander than I had fifteen years ago, so I can afford fewer mistakes.
Whenever I feel like skipping a blog post or five pages of my script, I tell myself that every day is precious, and how much closer to my goals I will be if I knuckle down and get on with it.
That’s what I wish for you, too.
As Jim Rohn once said:
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”
More expansively, and perhaps more cynically, Marcus Aurelius put it like this:
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
In other words, if I feel the need to stay warm and snuggle under my duvet, I should grab myself by the scruff of the neck and drag my duvet to my desk and drape it over my knees before opening my laptop.
Success and discipline go hand in hand.
Remember the swimming swan if you are in any doubt.
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