The exercise of writing every day teaches us many lessons. There are glorious periods of sunshine when the muse whispers in your ear and fills your working session with wonder. You look forward to sitting at your desk, and by some magical method, words, sentences, and paragraphs become completed pages. The process is effortless. Other days you drag yourself to the keyboard. You seem uninspired, but you sit, force yourself to type, and you connect to the magic, the obstacles disappear, and you finish with more than you could have imagined. You feel as if you could write forever. These are the days I forget to eat, and hours and minutes pass in unique ways, expanding and contracting as if I were aboard some strange time machine.

Then there are days when, despite your best efforts, the words are crap. You forget how to spell simple words, turning a phrase turns into compost bin scraps, and the delete key sees more use than any other under your inept fingers. How easy it would be to give up, vow to double down on your day job, and kiss your dreams goodbye.

Discipline makes you strong, and you battle through, working, and writing until you reach your daily goal. The chances are, when you edit those hard-won words, you find gems you didn’t recognize when you wrote them. Even words written on a good day could be crap. Regardless, they exist on the page. They are words you can edit. Words you can spit-polish and shine to tell your best story.

How is your writing discipline developing?

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Keep on writing.

Jo Hawk The Writer