Short answer: watch this, then get back to work:
Long answer:
Storytelling is a fearless act. There is no room for your misgivings, hunger, thirst, or urges. Creation is nothing short of a mystical experience. Mystics prepare themselves to go into the cave alone, so you must prepare yourself too.
So how do you get ready for the cave? You force discipline on yourself in a dozen ways every day. You do something uncomfortable and you sit in that discomfort for as long as you promised yourself you would. Every little act of discipline, no matter how small, deepens a neurological groove in your brain that will serve you well in the cave.
Here are some of mine: I put myself in bed at 9:00PM and I wake at 5:00AM for weight lifting or hot yoga. I practice intermittent fasting. I turn off the phone and read books. I pack lunches and save money. I sit down and meditate every day. These are not things I love to do. I do them because they suck.
What do these things have to do with writing? Everything. Writing is a physical act of defiance. It takes strength to sit at the keyboard or the notebook and slap down the shittiest draft ever, to finish it without pausing to ask your fears for permission. You must be strong.
This is not permission to take a few months or years off writing to get fit. You may not spend thousands of dollars on a writing conference before you’ve finished some work. No, a lot of work. You may read some books on writing, I guess, but not during your writing time. In fact, if this is your writing time, I command you to leave this article now and come back to it when your writing time is done. Anyone who has boxed knows that if you take a week off of sparring, you will start blinking again when you get back to it. You must face your dark cave every day without blinking.
No matter how much sweat you’ve left on the sauna floor, no matter how many om’s you’ve om’ed, you will be uncomfortable in the cave. After all, if enlightenment were comfy, we'd all be levitating.
We are not taught to be uncomfortable. Uncomfortable people don’t contribute to society. Uncomfortable people revolt and escape. Storytellers are revolutionaries, and revolution is miserable. If you want to create stories, you must sit your butt in the dark cave.
Luckily, the muses live in the dark.
When you clock in to your cave, you’re on the muses’ time. You must not waste the muses’ time, or they will stop appearing for you. They are shy flowers, planted in hip-deep mud in the back tunnels of your cave. You must work your way through the dark and the mud and the dead ends to where they’re waiting, bursting with idea seeds.
This work part is hell because the cave echoes with your fears. As soon as you put pen to paper, you will hear:
What a waste of time.
There’s no market for this.
You aren’t good enough.
There are more important things you should be doing.
The muses never bother to yell louder than your fears.
In the dank, smelly mud, you will forget why you wanted to write in the first damn place. You will hit the pause button for a snack or a wank or a few retweets, forgetting that “Pause” buttons often turn into “Stop” buttons. You need a plan that keeps you in the muck long enough to get your work done.
Anne Lamott visualizes turning her fears into her squeaky-voiced mice, dropping them by their tails into a jar, sealing the jar up tight, then turning a volume button all the way up and then down. Steven Pressfield has written a whole book about it. I like to write down all of the things my fears say on post-it notes, tear them up, and throw them out. Then, most importantly, I get back to work. I gather up my strength and slap down the shittiest draft ever. I finish. I do not pause for relief. I do not ask my fears for permission to continue, because the answer is always, always no.
After the shitty draft, you get to breathe for a bit. You’ll need a walk and some rest, because then comes unmerciful editing and publishing. These are also fearless acts, but they require wisdom and humility, and that's a whole other article. To finish the first draft requires power.
Here are some things that help feed my discipline. You'll find your own.