The best discipline

Oh. I write every day. (Not this blog. My economics blog. Every day, four a.m.)

When I write, I'm fussy. After I get the idea down on paper I start at the top and read and fix things and take a break and read and fix things and take the dogs out and read and fix things. I start reading at the top, stop when I have to fix something, fix it, and start reading from the top again.

You have to read from the top, I think, to get the "flow" right. Also, sometimes the tense is wrong or the plurals are wrong or there is some other mistake, and you don't catch it if you start reading from the "fix". You have to start from the top. Or from a break point. I put little separator lines between separate ideas or after I've made a really good point.

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Anyway, the point is, I keep fixing the thing until I'm happy with it. I read all the way through to the end without fixing anything, and come back later and do it again, and I'm happy with it. So by the time my post is up, at four in the morning, I'm pleased with it and pleased with myself.

Yeah, no, you wouldn't want to be around me then.

And it is tempting to read the thing over a number of times, just for the satisfaction I get from it. But it's such a waste of time. So I try to discipline myself to read it the one more time, and make sure I don't have to fix anything, put something in quotes or italics maybe, or look up a word just to be sure I used it right.

And then I move on to the more pressing matter: I have nothing scheduled for four o'clock tomorrow.

And that's the best discipline, having to write something else. It pulls me out of that whirlpool of ego and gives my mind a new focus. I try to write at this hour, three, four, five in the morning when the house is quiet and my mind is free of the previous day's work-related chatter. And there are lots of days when I've got a good start on something, or maybe even finished it, and I drive to work thinking about it, and the ideas in my head fascinate me till lunchtime.

And that's my day.