While I wouldn’t personally state it quite so strongly - not a knock of Nerick, of course, I’m just a soft touch sometimes, hard to believe as it is - but I absolutely agree. Speaking as someone who literally writes for a living, if all you’ve got is discipline, there’s exactly two places you’re going - either nowhere, or burnout.
Writing, overall, is a lot like a good fart - if you have to force it, it’s probably going to be shit. Everybody got their thing, their little rituals and processes to get to that place where they can do it.
Personally, I tend to use a combination of google docs and scrivener, depending on what I’m doing, I’ll have a fresh tea on the desk. Then I’ll flip on a video(Youtube, netflix, Prime vid, maybe a dubbed anime because I can’t read subtitles while I’m going, sometimes just music, sometimes podcasts), and get down to business. When videos end or similar, I flip over and switch them, when I run out of tea, I take a longer break to refresh it, at which point I might have a snack. Both serve as little soft-breaks, where I can keep thinking about what I’m doing, go back over things in my head, and resettle without breaking from the task entirely, which would make make coming back much harder. My trick is less forcing focus or constant effort, than understanding my own ebb and flow of attention and effort, and how to surf that wave rather than trying to swim against it or getting dumped by it. Fugue state management games, basically.
In the past when I was a more frequent smoker, I’d also sometimes sit out in the sun with my typewriter and laptop, and just sit there, write, smoke, drink tea, research and so on on the laptop where needed. I wrote a lot of stuff for radio that way when weather permitted. It was nice. Pipes were especially good for that, since I could smoke hands free, and a good pipe could last for a fair while before needing attention.
Ironically, distraction free writing tools drive me fucking bonkers. Brain spins faster than fingers can move, even being able to type quite fast, so I have to end up going back and forward in a way that doesn’t fit my mental pattern, or try to pull it back and slow down mentally, both of which really throw me off. Having something else going in the background takes up just enough mental bandwidth to match gears and keep things rolling right. Embracing distraction and using it as a tool, rather than trying to exclude it works much better for me.
(Edit - and yeah, there’s also a lot of going back and editing what I’ve already written here and there as I go. As anyone who has seen one of my posts here go through a half-dozen revisions over time might guess.)
