• Don't throw yourself away

• Honor your words

• Discipline is your obligation to the gift

This is your life, this is your memory, this is your work.

Don't Throw Yourself Away.

Whether you write fiction or memoir, screenplay or poetry, it is your writing. You invest time and energy in your writing. You set the timer and you write a piece and later someone asks you how long it took you to write it and you don't say five minutes or ten minutes or even twenty minutes because you know that it took you a lifetime to write it. You had to live it and get inside it and let it get inside you before you could write it.

That's why you type it up. It has taken you a lifetime to get it and if you don't type it up you throw it away. When we worked with Natalie Goldberg she said you must not toss yourself away. Tossing yourself away means that you don't honor what you write.

When you write by hand on paper with a pen, you are getting close to the page and the work comes out of you in a flood. Some writers say "Oh, I can't use this in my book so I won't type it up."

Memory fades. The work is yours. You have a better chance of getting it all if you type up what you write. Don't throw yourself away. There are plenty of people out there ready to do that for you.

Honor your words.

This is your life and this is your art. When you go deep into the timed writing, you pull small gifts from the unconscious. There is no one but you who sees those words, although if you write with a group, others will hear them. When you write under the clock, you honor the words by reading them aloud. When you type up what you write and read, you honor your words by not throwing them away.

If you leave the words in the notebook, the work piles up and one day you see a stack of a hundred notebooks and you say, "Oh God, I'll never get that typed up." And you wind up throwing yourself away. All that time, all those little gifts from the unconscious are gone. And nothing can get them back. If you type up what you write, you have a chance to discover what you said. No one else cares. You are the only one who cares. If you don't care, if you don't type up your work, no one else will ever see it and who knows what life you did not change. To be a writer you must honor yourself. You must honor the words.

Discipline is your obligation to the gift.

It takes discipline to become a writer. It doesn't happen over night and it doesn't happen by chance. Discipline. Finish what you start. Type up what you got. Discipline begets more discipline.

If you write one scene a day in writing practice and if you type it up every day, in one year you will have a story with 365 scenes in it. It takes about fifty scenes to make a screenplay or a novel. Do it every day and you become a writer.

But you have to honor your words, you do not throw yourself away, and you practice the discipline. Without discipline you do not finish and you waste your time and your life.

Time is not your friend.