Write Good or Die

isn’t the job. It’s the money they get from the job, money that lets them pay the bills and support their family. Sure, a handful like their work, but most like the paycheck and benefits better.
    Here’s the problem: there are no paychecks and benefits when you work for yourself. If that’s your motivation for working, then you’re not going to have much luck freelancing—providing you carry that motivation into your freelance work.
    Let’s boil it down a bit more. When you begin freelancing, you do it for the love. Often you wait for the muse or until you get an order or if a friend asks for your help with something that you’re good at. Eventually, you make some money at this, and then you realize you might be able to make a living at it.
    Already bad habits have formed. You start doing this as a hobby, after everything else of importance gets finished. It feels natural to do the freelance work last.
    Other things are always important. Your daughter skins her knee, the phone rings, a friend needs help moving. You have to learn to make your hobby or the thing you did only when you “had time” become your first priority.
    How do you do that?
    Unfortunately, I can’t tell you. What you need to do is specific to you. There is no magic bullet, no one-size-fits-all answer.
    But let me give you some ideas, based on my own experience.
    And as I typed those words, I heard my writing friends giggle. They are all convinced that I’m the most disciplined person they know. They’re wrong. In most things, I lack discipline entirely.
    Unlike most of my writing friends, I have not held a full-time job for years. Why? Discipline. At some point, the paycheck isn’t enough for me. I hate having someone tell me what to do, and that always triumphs.
    Even the radio job which I loved didn’t last long. I quit four separate times. Each time the station hired me to be interim news director at my insistence. I didn’t want the permanent job. So I stayed until someone new came on board, and came back as interim director when that someone new left. I remained at the station in between as a volunteer, working a few nights per week. But I didn’t want to be an employee there. The only thing that broke that years-long cycle, by the way, was my move out of town.
    Discipline has always been a major issue for me. I get bored easily, and I don’t play well with others. So hiring a personal trainer, for example, would never work for me. I would do my best to circumvent anything the trainer told me.
    In my forties, I had a piano teacher. I stayed until I learned how to play the instrument adequately. Then I realized I was seeing how much practice it actually took to convince the teacher I had spent days at it instead of an hour or two. Once I fooled her a few times, we were done.
    This is why I never became a musician. I didn’t have the discipline. And I love music. At one point in my life, I played 15 different instruments. (Only two of them really well.) I just don’t love music enough to conquer my discipline problem.
    I love writing enough to work through each issue as it comes up. How? By figuring out what stopped me from getting a day’s worth of work involved.
    Each time I solved one issue, another cropped up. Then I would have to solve that one. This pattern continues to this day.
    When I discuss this with students, I tell them that gaining discipline is a series of mind games. Your mind will find good and effective ways to stop you. You have to figure out ways around them. The old cliché about when a door closes, go through a window applies here.
    I can sense the frustration among you now. I’m not being specific enough to help. So let’s go back through my initial points, above, and I’ll tell you how I get around them. Maybe that will strike a chord.
    First, health issues. But in short, here’s what helps me. I imagine making my excuses to a boss. If a good boss would let me go home sick or encourage me to stay away from the office, then I stay away from the computer. But if I can put in a day of so-so work, I do. I store up projects for days when my illness is present, but not so bad that I have to spend the day in bed. Those are the projects I do when I’m not feeling well.
    Second, my annual days off. I have a few of them—birthday, anniversary, Christmas, and a couple of others. If I don’t take those days, I’m angry at myself. Sometimes I take an entire week around it. That’s just reasonable for