Rigour and rigidity

I have a couple of mantras I like to keep in my back pocket for when the words come slowly, or not at all. I’ll mutter them to myself as I slouch toward my desk in the morning. Stuff like: Know what you’re going to do before you do it, then do it with focus and rigour.

What the hell does that even mean?

In my case, it means that when I’m writing a scene or a chapter in a book, it’s a good idea to know what happens in that passage before I start typing, or mostly these days, dictating. I don’t need to know exactly, word for word, what I’m going to write. But the storytelling will go much easier if I have some idea of what’s meant to happen.

And the focus and rigour?

Focus means excluding everything that isn’t meant to be on the screen in front of me. My phone is set to Do Not Disturb and usually parked on the other side of the room. I don’t have email or social media open anywhere. In fact, I don’t have anything open other than the relevant files.

And rigour?

For me, that means following process. I have a writing process I’ve honed over decades. It probably looks a bit odd from the outside, but it works for me. I do a check-in with myself. I ask how I’m feeling. I acknowledge any anxiety or unruly feelies that might knock me off course and lead to the dread spiral of procrastination. I list my writing tasks for the day. I meditate for five to ten minutes. I get after it in 50-minute writing sessions, separated by ten-minute breaks.

That’s my version of rigour, and it works well… until it doesn’t.

Which it hasn’t for about six weeks now. Mostly because I’ve had dozens of tradies crawling over my house, replacing the roof after a hailstorm damaged it.

It’s been enough of a disruption to knock me completely out of my routine, which tells me something sort of uncomfortable. I probably wasn’t being rigorous in following that routine. I was just being rigid. Inflexible. I wasn’t able to adapt when the routine was challenged.

That’s how I came to be sitting in my car outside of a hospital, typing this on my phone. (No biggie, don’t worry. I’m not the one who needed the hospital visit.) The final tradie left on Wednesday, but as soon as he was gone, this other stuff happened. And here we are.

So after six weeks of not getting my next book done, I’m taking a deep breath and figuring out how, in future, I can be rigorous in my work habits without being rigid. Because rigidity hasn’t worked out so well. I’ve been stalled at 70,000 words, and I want at least another 30,000 to finish.

Part of it, I think, might mean accepting defeat. I wanted to release this next book, World War 3.3 in November. But I can see it’s going to be mid-January before I get there. Okay, JB. Take a breath. Let it go. Use the “extra” writing time to make the story a little better. Know what you’re going to do before you do it, then do it with focus and rigour.

In the meantime, for those of you who are audiobook listeners, the third and final volume of Sleeper Agent dropped this week. Well, it’s the third and final instalment of the Cooper Fox origin story. I liked this character so much that I think I’ll be writing him for years to come. But the story of how he came to be is now done, at least in audio. It feels like the only thing, besides smokin’ up some flat chickens, that I achieved this week, or any time recently.

You can get it here.

And when it gets out of Audible jail, you’ll be able to get it everywhere, in any format.

I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, I’ll be taking a good, long, hard look at myself.