Write Good or Die

preparing it for the actual writing. That bright and shiny part of writing is appealing to me, and I always have more than one project going just to keep that bright and shiny part of my brain occupied.
    I work well at the end of a project as well. Gone are the days when I’d just skip the end (I got tired of Dean looking at me and saying, “You skipped the last 10,000 words again”). When I know how something will end, I want it finished, and I work harder to get it done so that I can move onto the bright and shiny new thing.
    I’m not anywhere close to that on the Freelancer’s Guide.
    Then there’s the daily battle against “I want to read” and “I want to eat” and “I want to see a movie/news/TV.” The battle against “I want to be doing something else, something that sounds fun, because right now, this project isn’t fun.”
    Or as I usually say to someone who complains on television (and dammit, they can’t hear me), “Wah.”
    Discipline gets a freelancer past all the complaints, but it’s not the discipline you imagine from all those movies about military school or from watching Tiger Woods interviews about his dogged determination to be the first on the course and the last to leave.
    Discipline gets the job done, as Malcolm Gladwell noted in his controversial book, Outliers. The musicians who put in more practice hours have more success than those who put in fewer hours. Same with athletes, and same with writers and almost everyone else in the arts. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama spent more time on the campaign trail in their initial successful Presidential bid than any of their opponents did—both in hours per day, and days per week.
    But how did they do that? How do some musicians, playing the same instrument with the same intensity as other musicians, manage to hit the practice room more often? Why does Tiger Woods work harder than every other professional golfer on the course—especially since he says, quite frankly, that it’s the hours of practice that make him the golfer he is.
    Let’s stick with Tiger for a moment. My husband used to be a professional golfer, so golf is important to our household, and Dean has more insight than most about the sport. We’ve watched Tiger since he won the U.S. Amateur competition in the 1990s. Dean told me then that this kid would be a phenom, and he is.
    More than a decade later, Tiger Woods can rest on his laurels, but he doesn’t. He won the U.S. Open last year, playing for four days with a destroyed knee and a cracked bone. Golf days last six hours or so, and golf, for those of you who don’t play or follow the sport, hurts knees more than any other part of the body because of an unnatural twisting motion that the golfer must make when he swings.
    It takes discipline to go to that course every day, in extreme pain, but you see it not just in Tiger Woods, but in most athletes at the pro level. It’s so bad in most professional sports that teams have doctors on stand-by to order a badly injured player off the court/field so that the injury will not become permanent and career ending.
    What causes this attitude? Sportscasters call that “heart,” but it’s more than heart. We’ve all seen high school players with heart, players who will give their all when the time comes to win the big game.
    But it’s not the big game that matters. It’s the practice. It’s sitting down to play scales for the 50,000th time because you need to warm up your hands before getting to Mozart. It’s the drudgery of the same thing every day, with no defined ending.
    It’s the ability to overcome the urge to grab the bright and shiny and interesting to finish what you’ve started.
    It’s—and I’m sorry to say this, folks—it’s what gets you to your day job five days per week, fifty-two weeks per year.
    The problem is that most people don’t apply that same discipline to their freelance work. There are reasons for this, which I’ll get to. And, before the comments come in, let me add that I do realize that most people at a day job are not working at their best. Maybe they never do as well as they could. Many never reach their full potential. Most don’t even try.
    So what is it that makes some people work hard at their freelance careers while others work hard enough to get by or can’t figure out a way to work at all?
    It’s not discipline. It’s figuring out how to get yourself to work.
    Seriously. What gets most people to their day jobs