So. Early in the month of June, I made a pact with myself that I would write every single day for the entire month. It is now June 17^th and I have stuck to it, and I don’t anticipate any trouble continuing on through the end of the month. Besides being invigorating because I’ve been more productive so far this month than I have in recent months—and there’s still two more weeks of productivity ahead of me—the write every day for the entire month scheme has reminded me of the truth behind one of the cardinal rules of writing: writers don’t wait for inspiration (or time, or whatever the excuse may be) to write; writers just sit down and get to it, whether they feel like it or not. Whether they’re inspired or not. Whether they feel they have time or not.

This point has been hammered home to me on the days in this past month when I really, really, REALLY didn’t feel like writing. Picture it: it’s 11 PM. Your baby is asleep beside you on the bed—because she can’t sleep if you’re not lying in bed next to her—and you’re tired. Or you really feel like reading. Or you just want to zone out to some Netflix. Or maybe, even, you have papers to grade or work to do on your Blackboard course for the summer.

But if you don’t write, you don’t get that little tick in your goal logsheet for today, and if you don’t get the little tick for today, you may as well give up because you didn’t meet your goal for the month. So you open up the file of the project you’re working on, and tell yourself if you only write for fifteen minutes, that’s okay. It still counts.

And you get to work. You reread the last page or so that you wrote yesterday. Then you force out a sentence. Then another. They’re awful and stilted, but you keep going anyway. You continue like this for a paragraph, maybe two. Each sentence takes forever to write, and you half wonder why you’re bothering since you’ll probably just delete them again tomorrow.

But then something miraculous happens. A sentence materializes in your mind, and it’s a good one. Just as you’re getting it out, another sentence follows. You start typing faster—they’re coming more quickly now. You begin to feel like you’re not writing at all, but transcribing something that someone else is reading to you. You go, go, go, go, go until the flow slows down, and trickles to a stop. You look at the clock. You look at your word count. You’ve accomplished something here. And to think, you almost didn’t bother.

The desire to meet my goal has kept me motivated to write every day, and the act of sitting down and writing clicks my brain into writer mode. No matter how uninspired I feel when I turn my computer on, if I sit in front of that computer and force myself to type, it doesn’t take long before the creative machine turns on and begins telling me what to write. It’s almost like the inspiration sometimes just needs to know you’re serious. “Oh. She really means it this time. She’s going to just go ahead and write whether I show up or not. Look at that crap she’s writing. I better get over there.”