The unfortunate truth about life as a creative outsider is that it’s not about freedom, it is about discipline and focus. The single most important reason we fail in creative work isn’t the indifference of the market, the literary agents and publishers who don’t recognize the value of our work, or even our lack of marketing chops. It is our own work habits. Successful creative outsiders develop work habits that build up momentum in the first hour of the workday. Unsuccessful ones don’t.

Stephen Pressfield wrote a great book on this – The War of Art. That war is with ourselves. 

The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
      - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

A couple of days ago, I came across a great article on this subject by author, coach and writing teacher Joni Cole in Jane Friedman’s weekly blog digest. Cole’s article applies the principles of Steven Covey’s classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People in reverse. Here are a couple of paragraphs from her article, The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Writers: Powerful Lessons in Personal Sabotage. 

Habit 3: Put first things first.

Highly effective people act. Every day, they manage their time and make choices in a way that feeds their personal and professional life. . . Highly ineffective writers also make choices every day about where they spend their time and energy. First things first, they choose to start their days by texting all their writing friends to see if anyone else got up early to write. Then they check out a bunch of Instagram reels and go down that rabbit hole of celebrity StarTracks until finally, after they’ve finished clicking through a slideshow of fifty unforgettable looks at the Venice Film Festival, they are ready to work on that new chapter. . . except now it’s time to go to their day job.

And so goes another morning, another week, another weekend. For the highly ineffective writer, every day is a race against the clock to say “yes” to as many things as possible —social media, rearranging the photos on the mantle, volunteering wherever they are needed. The highly ineffective writer is a master of prioritizing anything that is not writing.

I contacted Joni and arranged an interview at the end of October.

I remember a best-selling author (I think Jonathan Franzen) saying in an interview by Terry Gross on Fresh Air that when he got his new laptop he took some Crazy Glue, applied it to the end of an ethernet cable, stuck it in the port, and then used a pair of wire cutters to cut off the cable right where that plastic doohickey snaps into the computer. Thus, he was able to live uninterrupted in the reality he was creating in his head.

Every creative struggles with this –- with getting started, with building the internal momentum required to do significant work, and then to persist through failed attempts to create something significant. And every successful creative develops work habits and strategies that allow him or her make it though that crucial first hour of work each day.

Ernest Hemingway learned to end each day on a high note, knowing where he’d start the next day.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Another of his practices was, when struggling, and needing to find somewhere to start, to write the truest sentence he knew.

...sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. 
      - Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Other than perhaps an imagination capable of inciting excitement in oneself and others, self-discipline is the key requirement to living a quality, creative life on your own terms.

Always remember, your focus determines your reality.
     - George Lucas