Discipline is something that matters in writing. After all, if we don’t have a certain amount of discipline, we’d never manage to get anything at all done. Without discipline, that fantastic idea for your novel would remain just that – an idea.

And the good thing is that discipline doesn’t have to stifle your creativity or inspiration, but it does help you get words down on the page. Still, developing discipline over writing is something that can take time, especially when we have to fit it around so much else in our lives. There are, however, plenty of things that we can do to help get us into a more successful writing groove.

For example, many writers find that writing at the same time every day helps them. It’s a useful way of developing a habit and making progress – even if it’s just a few hundred words a day or a couple of pages edited in each session, it all helps. Other writers aim for the discipline of reaching a certain word count in each session. Again, this is a good way of seeing your progress build up and the satisfaction of watching the word count grow can help to develop your discipline and resolve to keep on going.

There’s also no getting around the fact that completing a piece of writing – particularly if it’s a full length book – is hard. Inspiration and ideas are wonderful, but they’ll only get you so far. I think it’s fair to say that there is a point in the writing of every book where the writer hits something of a wall. It becomes a challenge to keep on going, but equally there then comes a point where you get past the wall and it starts to feel a little easier.

But hitting that wall could so easily be all it takes for you to abandon that great novel. Discipline is how we get through it and keep on going to make sure we make it to the end. It isn’t easy. I’d wager that many, if not most, published writers have at least one half-finished novel in a drawer somewhere, that they started to write but then for some reason – hitting the wall, losing interest, getting stuck and not being able to fix it – gave up on.

It makes us feel bad when we abandon a project, but in a way even that can be helpful for discipline. We’ve had a taste of failure and don’t want it to happen again, and so the next time we embark on writing a novel, we vow to keep on going no matter what, just to get to the end of the draft. Of course, discipline isn’t the only factor at play. Determination and the strength of our ideas also matter, but without that discipline to sit down and write for another day, the best intent in the world won’t get us very far.

Discipline is different for everyone. For some, it might mean setting the alarm every morning to get up and write before work. For others, it might be setting a word count goal for each week or finding ten minutes here and there throughout the day to jot down a few sentences. How you decide to go about it is up to you, but one thing that’s true for all writers is that this is a skill we need to develop.

What do you think?