Discipline looks different for everyone. What looks like screwing around could be creativity in motion.

I manage a team of writers. Some of them adopting the trade for the first time, a few trained professionals, and at least one a member of the ‘look-a-that-shiny-thing-over-there’ generation. Anyone else would think he had A.D.D., mastering the art of being unproductive distractions messing about on the inter-tubes.

The guys sitting next to him, starring at their computer screens struggling to come up with one good sentence sure think so.

That’s just how he works. Give him an hour, and suddenly he spits out brilliance. It’s somewhat annoying to those who spend the same amount of time beating their head on a table to get half the brilliance.

Which is why I’ve started writing this blog post and spent the last while surfing the web. Because forcing things doesn’t work. My discipline is to write until noon every Sunday. London doesn’t open until about then so any errands or markets I want to soak in are barely buzzing until mid-day.

But writing until noon doesn’t look like you might imagine – or you’ve walked in these same shoes and know exactly what it looks like; hanging up laundry, gaffing about in the kitchen, making coffee, paying bills, watching the top 40 on MTV, shooting photos of the view outside my window, downloading songs from iTunes.

And every once in a while, toggling back to Scrivener and tightening up a paragraph or find the perfect sentence to describe the color I painted the bathroom of my Hancock Park apartment in 1998.

How do you measure progress? Who decides what the right way to write a book is? The relationship you have with your first novel is like no other. It’s an investment of time. A labor of love. It’s every cliche you use when you talking about doing something really fucking hard.

You live with your first book your whole life. It just comes out on it’s own, and forcing it leads to doubt.

I’m out of paper towels. Need toothpaste, and shoes for an event next Saturday. Time to get out of the house.