I write, and I read a bit about writing. Plenty of people advocate strict methods for writers: write a page a day, wake up at 5:00 to get the words down, and stick to a schedule no matter what.
On the other side, you have those who idolize the strange habits of creative geniuses — the ones who slept all morning, drank all day, and only started writing at midnight. (I recently read that Stephen King used to chase his cocaine with a case of beer — every single day. He’s since sobered up, thankfully.)
But here’s the thing: for the vast majority of people, discipline, order, and routine make them better at what they do. Creative geniuses like King are outliers. Their immense talent might allow them to thrive in chaos, but that’s not a model for the rest of us.
The psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison … argues for a strong connection between mental illness and literary creativity in her classic book Touched with Fire. … [F]iction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, ‘It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness.'” (From The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall.)
I don’t like the assumption that there’s a touch of madness in all geniuses, but I think it’s clear we shouldn’t look to them as examples.
Even among the “very good but not genius” class, you have to master the rules before you earn the right to break them.
Nobody wants to wake up at 5:00 to exercise, spend a half-hour in prayer before breakfast, or force themselves to write 300 words a day. Nobody enjoys playing scales and arpeggios, practicing brush control, or drilling their freestyle catch over and over. I’ve read of cartoonists who hate staring at that blank page that confronts them every day.
It’s precisely the things we don’t feel like doing that propel us towards our goals. Excellence requires amazing discipline and structure, and even basic competence requires some.
Genius is something you have or you don’t, but anybody can do hard work. And for most of us, it’s discipline, not inspiration, that gets us where we want to be.
I’m not saying you have to write a page a day, or follow any specific program for success. I am saying you should follow some program and be disciplined about it.
