Sundays are special. It’s a day for worship (if you are so inclined), to spend time with family and friends, to relax, and to reflect on life. But for me, Sundays are special in another way. It’s the only day of the week where I have a schedule.
Unlike most people in normal jobs, no outside force sets a writer’s daily activities. No one demands that we show up at a certain time, take breaks at a certain hour, or get a specified amount of work done. On the surface that sounds great. In reality, not so much.
Humans need schedules to perform at their potential. They need goals, deadlines, and accountability. But without an external force supplying these touchstones, the writer must create them. And that, my friends, takes an enormous amount of discipline. Discipline which, sad to say, I’ve lacked most of my life.
I so want to be a writer that’s read. Scribbling away in a journal is fine, and it comes with its own satisfactions. But it’s not the same as producing a story to entertain. For some reason, probably ego related, a published story seems more tangible. More of a real thing, even though in this digital world few people will ever hold one of my physical books.
The thing is, a story—short, novella, or novel length, it doesn’t matter—takes a tremendous amount of organization and general pig-headedness to complete. I read somewhere that only one novel gets finished for every thousand started. Not published, but finished so that it has a chance of being published. And the thing that keeps them from being finished is discipline.
The discipline to sit down every day and write. The discipline to grind away at the edits and rewrites. The discipline to wake up each day with the belief that today will be a great writing day, no matter how awful yesterday turned out.
Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of discipline. Not yet. I’m a work in progress. So I look for models. People in my life with discipline. Times in my life where discipline has somehow emerged from the general chaos that characterizes my normal day. And one of those times is Sunday.
I know what I will do, from waking to bed, every Sunday. Each activity occurs at roughly the same hour of the day. It lasts for a certain amount of time. And I go into it knowing what I want to achieve.
As a result, I rarely go to sleep Sunday night wishing for a do-over. I may not accomplish everything I set out to do, or perhaps failed spectacularly to accomplish anything, but at least I showed up at the appointed time and gave it the old college try.
No other day of my week is so orderly. But they need to be if I’m going to meet my writing goals. So, after all this time, I’m looking to Sunday as my model.
Pray for me.
Recent Comments