Aiming For Consistency In Writing? You’re Screwed
Why trying to make writing a routine is missing the point.
They say you need to be consistent.
“Write every day.”
“Make it a habit.”
“Turn it into a ritual.”
And when you don’t, it feels like you’ve failed. Like you’re just not cut out for this. The whole thing is slipping through your fingers because you haven’t forced it into a schedule.
But writing doesn’t follow your plans. It shows up. Or it doesn’t.
Sometimes it’s steady. Sometimes it all comes at once. Sometimes nothing.
Trying to force it into a pattern can feel like control. But mostly it’s just frustration when the words don’t play along.
Weeks can pass without anything worth keeping. And then, out of nowhere, everything spills out faster than you can keep up.
It can be structured, or messy, or both. It can come and go without warning. Or settle into some kind of routine for a while, only to fall apart again.
Forcing it to be consistent only creates something to fix, manage, or control. But writing was never asking for that.
I'm quite enjoying your posts, Youri. Our views or visions of the creative act, process, and way of life are closely aligned. What you say about the importance of divining one's own creative rhythm instead of subjecting it to the Procrustean bed of a preconceived notion is vitally important to all writers and creators.
Here's a passage from my book WRITING AT THE WELLSPRING (currently in manuscript) that articulates the same point:
"We must each divine the rhythms of our own daemon muse, learning to speak when it speaks and remain silent when it is silent. Or, to put it somewhat poetically in words borrowed and altered from the Bard: To thine own muse be true. Your core creative strategy is to discover, through practical experimentation and sensitive attention to what works, the best ways in which your creative daemon needs to have a space cleared for it, and then to forthrightly execute that particular action—or non-action, as the case may be. If writing every day and zealously guarding that carved-out span of time is the way that you and your inner genius need to work, then run with it, and run hard. If, on the other hand, you find through trial and error that you really need to wait until your daemon asserts itself spontaneously by filling you with the desire and ability to write, then run with that instead.
"In my own experience, I have found that both of these possibilities require serious dedication and self-clarification. It may sound at first blush as if the approach of regular, scheduled work is the one that’s all about discipline, and that it is diametrically opposed to the other, which is all about indiscipline. But in fact the latter constitutes a deep and serious discipline of its own: that of keeping yourself attuned to your inner states and motivations as you wait for a ripe time to begin writing.
"In both cases, the ultimate point is the same: Your muse, daimon, genius possesses its own will and its own ways, and it visits and energizes you as and when it desires. Inspiration comes and goes. Your task is not to generate inspiration, and certainly not to control it, but to channel it, and to do so by whatever means necessary so that when it shows up, you are there to listen, receive, and bring into being what it is intent on giving the world through you."
https://www.livingdark.net/p/to-thine-own-muse-be-true-a35