Consistency and Taming the Monkey Mind
The Writing Practice
This week on Substack, David McElroy, posted a question on “How to Write for a Living,” and my response was in reference to my ongoing pontification (read procrastination here) over whether or not to put my short stories I am writing on a serialized fiction Substack account and make it paid.
Other writers in the thread had different concerns, but one of the more frequent comments was how to stay consistent, and it made me think of the masters again, like Natalie Goldberg, Anne Lamont, and Julia Cameron, among many others. All three women talk of a writing practice and its importance to a writer.
I think the reason for this is because everyone, writer or not, can attest to struggles with consistency at some point in their lives. We have all struggled with consistency with our exercise programs, nutrition programs, new habits we are trying to instill, and just maintaining a consistent positive outlook on life. Beginning and sustaining a practice of any sort is a good way to think about building consistency.
I can be the world’s worst at being inconsistent at most things, but one thing I make sure that I do every day is write my Morning Pages (three full 8.5x11 notebook pages a la Julia Cameron). In addition, I make sure to write three pages in my Gratitude Journal. All six pages are in the same notebook, but I designate a difference in the two, and the Morning Pages are more of a stream of consciousness type of writing, as Cameron says, to provide a brain dump of the wild and wacky voices in my head, also known as the Monkey Mind.
After the Morning Pages and Gratitude Journal pages, I don’t always get my writing in for the project I may have in front of me at the moment, but most of the time I do. The most important thing to me is to maintain those six pages everyday because they lead to a habit of writing and to ideas coming to me throughout the day. It is my hope that if I continue to build this writing practice in the morning, I will build the foundation for writing a set word count for the project at hand every day as I do my the others.
One other thing I do is to tell myself when I realize I am procrastinating is to tell myself what I tell my students in freshman composition classes when they are coming up with fifteen excuses for why they haven’t done their drafts: butt in chair, do the work. That is the bottom line for being consistent, and I have to remind myself of this pretty regularly.
I tell myself that I will never gain success as a writer by not writing. That is just the bare bones of it, and the reason that a writing practice like Cameron’s Morning Pages are so vital. By making sure I write those allotted number of pages every day, I establish a routine and put those words on the page. They are the only thing that counts. Without the words on the page, there is nothing to draw from to revise and polish, much like there would be no sculptures without a lump of clay. The morning writing practice provides the clay for my finished sculpture. That is my answer for consistency and it is a message to myself. I don’t presume to tell anyone else what to do, but if anyone should question my methods, I suggest reading Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamont, anything by Julia Cameron, and a couple others to check out are: Stephen King’s book, On Writing and, The War of Art, by Stephen Pressfield. They have much more experience than I in consistency.
In the mean time, I will be writing every morning.