So you want to be a writer? (ahem....)

So how do you cultivate the focus and discipline to finish a task? By continually doing the dull stuff. You do it until you’re used to it and getting through is a habit. For example, if you want to be a writer, you write, as Rebecca Solnit explains on LitHub:

Write. There is no substitute…But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don’t be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you’ll wear at the awards ceremony because that’s not what writing’s about or how you get there from here. The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot…it’s effort and practice. Write bad stuff because the road to good writing is made out of words and not all of them are well-arranged words.

Make your goal to simply write, and eventually you’ll get to the next boring step—edits.

The work may always be a bit painful, as acclaimed writers reveal. 

“More often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three,” poet and writer Maya Angelou tells the Paris Review. “That’s the cruelest time you know.”