Discipline

The late humor columnist Erma Bombeck described her writing process in an 1991 interview with the University of Dayton Quarterly:

"Discipline is what I do best. I can't imagine any writer saying to you, 'I just write when I feel like it.' That's a luxury, and that's stupid. The same for writer's block. If you're a professional writer, you write. You don't sit there and wait for sweet inspiration to tap you on the shoulder and say now's the time. We meet deadlines. I write for newspapers, and newspapers don't wait for anybody. You write whether you feel like it, you write whether you've got an idea, you write whether it's Pulitzer Prize material. You just do it. That's it. Discipline is what we're all about. If you don't have discipline, you're not a writer. This is a job for me. I come in every morning at 8 a.m. and I don't leave until 11:30 for lunch. I take a nap, and then I'm back at the typewriter by 1:30 and I write until 5. This happens five, six, seven days a week. I don't see how I can do any less."

Bombeck started writing at age 37 when she convinced the editor of a suburban weekly to pay her $3 a column. By the time she died, 32 years later, her columns were syndicated in 600 newspapers and her 10 books had sold 15 million copies.