Developing the discipline it takes to sit down on a regular basis and pound out a poem, story, article, or chapter in a novel, is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a writer. Whether you aspire to literary greatness, desire a profitable freelancing career, or wish only to record your thoughts, these suggestions will help you learn how to sit down, and just do it.

Discover Your Style

Some of us like to write in pencil on a yellow legal pad, and some of us like to pound away at our keyboards. Others prefer to write longhand in fountain pen in a Moleskine, or leather bound journal. Some select cheap disposable pens and spiral bound notebooks as our repositories. Whatever your preference, discover it, and then use it. Discovering it is a simple matter of keeping a journal in several different ways for a week at a time. Spiral bound one week, computer file the next, and so on until you've found the method that seems to work best for you. Once you've found it, use it exclusively. You'll find that establishing a ritualistic method of writing will help get you focused more quickly when you sit down to write.

Make the Time

Notice I didn't say, “Find the time”. I said, “Make the time” and that's exactly what I mean. Take out your day-timer, or load your electronic calendar. Block out writing time for the next five out of seven days. Yes, you may give yourself two days off each week, but during those other five days, make at least one hour of the twenty-four hour day your writer's hour. Call it that, if you like. Make it sacred. During that one hour, (or more - I need more, because I spend at least a half hour of my scheduled writing time humming and hawing and checking my e-mail before settling down to actually write.) you will focus all of your attention and energy on writing. Alert family members to the fact that this hour is your hour, and you are not to be disturbed. If this means popping in a video for the kids, or sending your spouse off on some errands (or out to play poker, go shopping, or whatever will keep them from knocking on the door of your inner sanctum), then do it. If it means hiring a sitter, or trading childcare time with a friend, do it. If you can write while chaos goes on around you, and being completely alone is impossible, then go for it.

Have An Inner Sanctum

This might be easier than it sounds. I live in a two-bedroom house with my spouse, and two teenagers. On weekends, when I do the most writing, we have a teenybopper over. There is no space that is only mine anywhere in my life, yet I have managed to create my own space.

My "Inner Sanctum" is a couch. It's red. It's leather. It's about six feet long, and it's mine. Adding headphones, which I plug into my laptop, makes this work for me. I can ignore the goings on around me so long as I've got Imogen Heap or Anugama blaring into my ears. People watch television around me. They make and take phone calls. Life happens at an astounding volume, but when I sit here on this couch, and I plug in my headphones, I'm in my inner sanctum. If attempting this would drive you to murder/suicide, create a corner of your bedroom that's dedicated to your writing. Or write in the bathroom. Or the car. Maybe you think I'm kidding, but I'm being completely serious. Find space. And use it.

Create a Goal and Reward System

Personally, I'm all about the word count. I thrill to the chirring whir of my laptop as it tabulates the number of words I wrote that day. Before sitting down to begin a project, I create a list of milestones. The first 1000 words gets me a Grande Frappuccino. The first 10 000? A manicure. Having this list of milestones and associated rewards can keep me going when I'm feeling uninspired, especially since I have told my spouse what these milestones are. If I say, “I'm going to get my nails done” he knows enough to ask me - “Did you write 10 000 words yet?”

After he's recovered from the swift kick in the shin I'll surely deliver if I haven't, I will knuckle under and write those first 10 000 words. Otherwise, my nails will look like crap until the day I die, and we can't have that, now, can we?

Word count may not work for you. Some writers prefer to go scene-by-scene or chapter-by-chapter. Some like to add up pages. Some create an outline and use the major events as milestones. Whatever gets you excited will work best.

And please make sure you actually reward yourself. When you don't, you are breaking a promise to yourself, and eventually your imagination, which is really nothing more than a little kid in disguise, will refuse to cooperate when you try to access it. It will flop down on the floor and have a tantrum, and you will be left high and dry with nary a good idea in sight.

Permit Yourself to Suck

This is probably the most difficult step of them all. If you're anything like me, you want every word you write to be just so. You have, in fact, caught yourself writing a paragraph, throwing it out, writing another, and repeating until you found yourself buried in a sea of paper snowballs. Do not do this. It makes baby trees cry, and its very bad for your writer's soul.

Let it suck. It's a first draft, for crying out loud. And if it's the second or third draft, well, let that suck, too. I can almost guarantee that if you finish it, and put it away for a period of days (at least a week), you will find merit in what you've written. You have my permission to moan and groan about how terrible it is, even while you're writing it, but write it anyway. Explore every half brained idea that comes into your mind, if you like. Swear like a sailor as you reluctantly commit the stupidest, most ridiculous sentences to paper. But commit yourself to the act of writing as a process, a process that includes writing the worst first draft you could possibly write. If you do this, you will find yourself with a half decent second draft, a pretty good third draft, and an excellent fourth draft.

And there you have it. Five small things you can do that will move you towards a disciplined writer's life. There are a thousand more things you can do to improve your writing. There are books you can read, and exercises you can undertake. But you must begin writing before these will have any impact whatsoever.

So, begin, already!

Happy Quills!

1. The most important thing is to create character. Create a living, three-dimensional character, inhabited by real feelings and thoughts, and motivated by real-life desires and fears.
2. Set your work in the real world.
3. Create real people who have real feelings and who exist in real situations.
4. Human motivation is basically simple. Universal, elemental desires operate within all of us.
5. The seven deadly sins are pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth
6. A character is the particularization of a type
7. Character drives action-not the other way around
8. Real people think real thoughts. Have your characters think. The most significant action is always in the mind.
9. The wise are not continuously wise. The foolish are not continuously foolish.
10. Find the “telling” detail.
11. Find the “telling” remark.
12. Find the “telling” action.
13. Avoid “drama.” Most life is not “dramatic” in the Hollywood sense.
14. Don't create superheroes; they don't exist.
15. Don't create monsters; they don't exist.
16. No real person is ever one way all the time. Everyone's a mixed bag.
17. Explore the ordinary, but shun the mundane.
18. Life is not a story, but life does provide stories. Be alert!
19. We are surrounded by the material for art. Pay attention!
20. Don't be boring. To avoid being boring, know what it is to be truly interesting.
21. Language is made memorable through attention to letters and sounds-through consonance, assonance, alliteration, and rhyme. Make your characters' language memorable and your characters will be memorable.
22. Ideas are made memorable through associations-examples, analogies, similes, and metaphors. Make memorable your characters' ideas and your characters will be memorable.
23. Pay specific attention to language in general.
24. Pay attention to your own language in specific.
25. Look at your writing globally and locally at the same time.
26. Readers will follow what's easy to follow. Parallelism (of words and phrases, of character and situation) makes things easy to follow. Strive to be parallel.
27. Know where you're going. Put up signs along the way.
28. Repetition creates meaning. Variation creates life.
29. Too few details erase; too many details obscure.
30. Too much to look at is as great a fault as too little to see.
31. Try not to be predictable. Do not, however, in the effort to avoid predictability, be absurd.
32. The unexpected is never impossible.
33. Don't pick scabs. That is, don't try to write about anything that hasn't fully healed within you.
34. If you want to pay someone back for something, don't do it in your writing. If you try to use your writing for revenge, you will falsify your art.
35. Do not use your art for praise or promotion. Art is not a vehicle for the dissemination of reward, particularly trophies of the self.
36. Avoid clichés--clichés of speech, clichés of character, and clichés of situation.
37. If you must use a cliché, freshen it.
38. Tie abstractions to the earth with specific instances, vivid examples, and concrete details.
39. Details, specifics, and examples unrelieved by ideas form a bog of badness.
40. In order to write well, think clearly and write simply.
41. Practice thinking in images.
42. Edit your own work. Editing is cutting and polishing a rough, dusty diamond until it shines. This works on precious stones, not lumps of coal. Know what you have in front of you.
43. Learn from others. Reading is a form of experience. So is observation
44. The lesson of Shakespeare and Dickens is that even minor characters are whole human beings.
45. We learn to speak by hearing speech and imitating it. We learn to write the same way-by reading writing and imitating it.
46. When we see what has been done, we can see what can been done.
47. If you don't have a clear sense of badness, how will you know how to avoid it?
48. It's as easy to have good taste as it is to have bad taste. Hang around the discriminating and you'll acquire better taste.
49. The process of revision is a constant asking “What if?” What if I change this word, this line, this idea, this event, this point of view?
50. An editor asks optometrist's questions. “How is this? Better? Worse? How about this?”
51. It's not enough to ask yourself if you were specific. Ask yourself, “ Can I be more specific here?” Then ask yourself, “ Should I be more specific here?”
52. There is no art without selectivity
53. Taking out is more important than putting in
54. An unusual word is unusual only once
55. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing
56. Too much of any one thing makes you sick.
57. Care about your work. If you don't care about it, why should anyone else care about it? If you don't take it seriously, why should anyone else take it seriously?
58. Think about why you are writing. Ask yourself what you really want to do in your writing.
59. Don't write garbage.