Writing Discipline
Memoir and a Painting of a Dog
What I always want to know about writers is how they stay disciplined?
I have never struggled to be disciplined when the work does not cost me anything. I can spend hours researching a dissertation topic, planning lessons, organizing a theater event, or painting a mural on the side of a cargo container. I can lose entire afternoons to projects that excite me.
The memoir is different.
The memoir asks something of me before it gives anything back.
A painting of a dog has been following me around for years. I began it during the pandemic when the world was shut indoors and every day felt like the one before it. At the time, the canvas held a boy and his dog. Then the dog died in 2022. The painting no longer felt right. Last summer, I painted over much of what I had done and started again, this time making the dog the center of the story. The canvas has sat on easels, against walls, and in corners of different rooms while life unfolded around it. My mother died and father-in-law also died in 2022. That was a dark year. In 2025, returned to graduate school. Now, I am helping revive a community theater. The painting still remains unfinished, but I am getting close.
Lately I have been wondering if the painting and the memoir occupy the same place in my life.
Neither is unfinished because I lack the ability to complete it. Neither remains undone because I do not care. In fact, the opposite is true. They remain unfinished because they matter. They require a kind of attention that is difficult to sustain while also carrying the responsibilities of work, family, grief, and ordinary life.
I sometimes tell myself that I need more writing discipline. That explanation is convenient because it sounds practical. If discipline is the problem, then the solution is a schedule, a word count goal, or a better routine. Yet I am beginning to suspect that discipline is not the real issue.
The real issue may be that I know exactly what waits for me on those pages.
The memoir is not asking me to invent a story. It is asking me to revisit one. It asks me to return to arguments, childhood memories, and losses that I have spent years learning how to carry. It asks me to look carefully at people I loved and people who hurt me, and sometimes they are the same people. It asks me to tell the truth, not the polished version that has become easy to repeat, but the version that still has sharp edges.
Some days the writing happens at the keyboard. Other days it happens while standing in front of a half-finished painting, remembering why it was started in the first place. Sometimes it happens while driving down a rural road, replaying a conversation from twenty years ago. Sometimes it happens while listening to a song that unexpectedly opens a door to a memory I thought had been closed.
I still believe the memoir will be finished. I believe the painting will be finished too. I am not someone who leaves things undone forever. I finish what I start, although rarely on the timetable I imagine when I begin. Is there something wrong with me? Is it adult ADHD or just too much work piled around me?
When the painting is complete, it will hang on a wall in our barn and become part of our family history. When the memoir is complete, it will become something else entirely. I like to imagine my memoir will become a movie. My sisters and I will be on a morning news show telling how the book happened. But, the best thing out of getting the memoir finished is it will become proof that I was willing to sit with the memories long enough to understand them.
After that, I suspect I will do what I have always done. I will rest for a little while, take a deep breath, and begin building something new. You ever think we are like ants? Each time I see an ant hill, I think about how we say, “I am not doing anything new; just gonna rest for a while.” Yet, we always find something to do.
There is probably no finish line for people who make things. There is only the satisfaction of completing one burden before picking up another and carrying it home.
What are you working on that you need to finish? Want to be accountability partners?
xx - Mary Alice
You've got this.