Western culture tends to focus on an all or nothing-at-all attitude whether you're talking about sports, business, even relationships. I remember at a conference I attended a motivational speaker stood up and told how he visited schools and told the kids, "There is no 'try', there is only do and win! Everything else is losing!"
He got a round of applause.
Not from me. I thought about the kids, 99% of whom would, by definition, feel like losers if they bought into his message.
I was reminded of this by reading a blog post by Cassie Sheets, who calls herself an undisciplined writer and who decided to try to write like Haruki Murakami--that is, to follow his writing (and life) routines, not to write in his style.
In researching my book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass, I learned about the writing process of many writers, so I knew that Cassie was starting at the tough end of the spectrum.
Murakami described his routine to Paris Review: "When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."
OK! He lost me at get up at 4am...and the daily 10k run...no, I go more for the Truman Capote mode which entails getting up late, working a bit, having a nap, working a bit and knocking off at 5 for a martini. I don't actually do all that, but it definitely sounds more appealing.
Anyway, Cassie Sheets fell pretty far short and yet--and this is the important bit--she ended up with a couple of better habits than she started with.
By the same token, if you set out to write 2000 words but you only do 500, you still have 500 more than you had a few hours before.
That's a lot better than considering yourself a failure and giving up, no matter what that motivational speaker said. In fact, I think having only a win/lose orientation is for losers.
(You will find writing advice from the top writers of all time, including Austen, Dickens, Twain as well as more current masters, in Your Creative Writing Masterclass, published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
