Discipline
Lately it seems the subject of discipline has been coming up a lot, at parties and book group discussions and even in an idle beach-vacation conversation with my mom. “What is your writing discipline?” people ask. “I’d never be able to do what you do,” my mother said. “I don’t have the discipline.”
This never fails to amuse me, because I think of myself as one of the least disciplined people on the planet. I sleep late most mornings, hang around in my pajamas half the day, am distracted continually by the siren songs of email and eBay and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. In between, I manage to sit down at a computer for a few hours almost every day and write down the stories I hear in my head. This seems to me more like therapy than work. Work is dragging yourself day after day to a dead-end job, or just thinking up what to eat for supper. Dating is work, raising kids is work, and balancing your checkbook is work; and I have a constitutional aversion to work. But I also have stories in my head, and luckily for me, other people want to hear them. So I write them down. It’s part compulsion, part sense of karmic responsibility. If you want to call that discipline, then I guess I’m guilty as charged.
