For me, creativity has always existed within a whirling dervish of inspiration, insecurity, misery, joy, and self-loathing. My writing process would go like this: I’d drink a ton of coffee, wander around the room, get myself amped up like an NFL player on the verge of a hike, and attack the keyboard like I just caught it breaking into my house. I would leap into the aforementioned Tasmanian Devil-like whirling dervish and allow him to chew and beat on me like the the grumbling, jibbish-spouting beast he is. I’d get a few bruises and scratches, but at the end of the whooping, I’d have a nice piece of writing. This worked for a bit, sort of. I successfully finished and published a novella using this method of, let’s call it, pace and assault, but, the model hasn’t proved sustainable. Not only is it unhealthy for me to force my body and mind into a state of caffeinated panic, but it’s undisciplined, and — I can’t believe I’m saying this — unprofessional.

Yes, I said it, unprofessional.

And I want to be professional.

This is something I’ve had to come to terms with over the years. I’ve had to to learn to deal with the fact that being a professional means acting like one, working like one, and (gulp) conducting business like one. Yeah… business. This is all a business.

Serious person business.

You see, that chaos business just doesn’t track for the long term. At least not for me. That chaos business doesn’t translate very well into the serious person business. Business business. It just leads to a lot of distraction, wasted time, and missed opportunities. Trying to invoke the whirling dervish has led me down a path of, well, endlessly invoking something that only comes along every so often. A Tasmanian Devil disguised as Hayley’s Comet, perhaps? I don’t know. All I know is I’ve come to a place in my creative career where I need a schedule to work. Hell, I want one. I like the feeling of accomplishing tasks, and creating tasks for myself that I must complete each day means I always have something to accomplish.

It’s really a self-fulfilling prophecy. You create the change you need, and that change can be created by initiating just a few simple changes. So you have to create the creation that changes the creative process which leads to more creation.

Right?

Right.

Let’s talk more about this.