Episode Description:
Welcome back to What If? For Authors! In this episode, Claire tackles the often-preached but rarely questioned idea of consistency in the writing world. If you've ever felt stressed about not maintaining a perfect daily writing habit or worried that inconsistency might ruin your career, this episode is for you.
Key Highlights:
Why Consistency Gets Overhyped:
Many authors are told that success depends on consistent daily output, but is that really true?
Claire shares her frustrations with the industry’s obsession over this idea and why it may not be the golden rule we think it is.
The Problem with the "One Size Fits All" Approach:
Some writers thrive on daily word counts; others don’t.
The myth that consistency guarantees success vs. the reality of different creative rhythms.
The Hidden Truth: You’re Already Consistent in Important Ways
Everyone has consistent patterns in how they think, feel, and act.
From how you handle plot holes to how you react to surprise opportunities—your personality is already shaping your writing patterns.
The Enneagram perspective: different types naturally approach consistency differently, and that’s okay.
Support the Show: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share it with your fellow authors.
Join the Conversation:
Share your thoughts and questions by reaching out to Claire at contact@ffs.media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor, and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors, as well as a humor and mystery writer. My latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, is all about how to root out the unsustainable practices in our writing life to avoid burnout and to spot the right opportunities for us when they come along.
Check it out by going to ffs. media forward slash sustain.
I'm excited to talk about today's episode because it's a topic that I am so goddamn tired of hearing about, and I want to put it to bed once and for all. That is what fun looks like for me. Settling the matter so I can stop hearing perfectly good and reasonable authors stress over something they heard someone tell them they were lacking, but that is apparently crucial to success?
I don't know. That is, of course, Today's episode about being consistent. We're going to ask [00:01:00] the question, what if I'm not consistent?
I hear this question a lot in coaching sessions. And to be clear, I'm not upset with or even annoyed at the people who ask it and worry about it. I'm more frustrated with the people who are out there preaching it as the only way to make it as an author. The only path to author heaven. I know you've heard it.
You've heard people make this claim before. People say success is not about anything other than being consistent each day. It's the writing 500 words each day adds up to 15, 000 words in a month, and four months of that turns into a novel. Okay, great. But what if I can't get myself to write 500 words a day?
What if trying to do that turns into a complete mental shit show of constantly feeling behind because I missed a day here and missed a day there? And then what if I force myself to write 500 words and there's such [00:02:00] absolute shit that I can't get myself to write again for a week? On and on. Right?
Now, the people who really preach consistent daily output as key to author success, I, you know, they pro they mean well. Let's just say they mean well. We'll just give them that generous assumption. It probably works for them. But I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. Some people will preach keys to success for others, while they themselves cannot necessarily use those keys.
When I hear someone in our industry talk about any one key to their success, and it's frequently consistency that they name, it reminds me of when local TV stations interview someone at their 100th birthday party, and then they ask them, What's the key to a long life? And the person often looking like they'd rather not have made it this far will say something like, drink whiskey every day and shout at your neighbors. [00:03:00] It's like, okay, you might've done those things every day, but there could be other ways to live to 100. And also considering your habits. You're probably just very lucky to make it this far.
My great grandma claimed that eating a plain bowl of oatmeal every morning was how she made it to 103. Worth it? Probably not. Effective? Also probably not, though fiber is always nice as we age. So that's a little of how I feel about this idea of consistency, specifically consistency and output as a writer.
If you're wondering, I don't have a single daily habit except for like brushing my teeth and getting worked up about something. Those are the only two things I can consistently say I do every day.
And yet, I feel like I've been pretty successful in my business despite that overall [00:04:00] lack of inconsistent output. Or maybe because of it, you know? Maybe it's brushing my teeth every day that has made me this successful. Maybe that is the key. If I make it past 100, which I probably won't, but if I make it past 100, I'm gonna tell everyone that that's why.
Okay, whatever. So let's get on the same page about what we talk about when we talk about consistency. I've kind of defined it, but it feels like it's this moving target. Right? What does consistency mean? It's, it's going to be different to everyone else. Everyone's going to have these associations with it.
These emotional associations, these mental associations, maybe even like physical associations with it. So it's not super well defined just by itself. Do we need to write every day? Right? Is that what consistency is? And now, when I hear people talk about consistency, it is generally a consistency of output or a consistency of a particular behavior, , [00:05:00] related to your writing.
It could be emailing one person each day, you know, whatever it is. But is this an everyday thing? Is this a every weekday thing? Like, can we take, uh, weekends and still be successful? Is this a once a week thing? Is this a every hour thing? Like, what time frame are we even talking about here? It really starts to seem silly and arbitrary upon even basic scrutiny.
So I will say I've consistently written some fiction every year. I've consistently published at least one book every year since 2014. Am I a consistent author? How are we going to define this, right? How can we pass a verdict on whether or not I'm a consistent author? I'm consistently unproductive in December.
So I take it off. Does that count as consistency? Right, so what does it even mean? What [00:06:00] time frame of consistency is virtuous? Which one is the key to success? And the answer is None of them, right? There is no virtue in consistency. There is no guarantee from consistency. So it may be time for us to let go of the idea of consistency altogether.
Just stop worrying about it. But Claire, don't I want my books in a series or under a single pen name to be consistent? I mean, sure, that can be a goal, but you don't have to work that hard on it. So more times than not, it'll just happen. Right? There'll be a thread of consistency, even if you don't see it.
And the worrying about, is my voice consistent here, doesn't do what you think it does. This is important. A lot of the time, we worry because we think it will motivate us in some way. And in fact, it only makes us miserable. It doesn't do the thing we [00:07:00] think it does.
But Claire, doesn't it help to have a consistent release schedule? I mean, people claim it does. But does it help sales enough for you to make yourself sick over it? Which is something I see people do all the time to meet their arbitrary deadlines. That just sort of bow down at the altar of consistency.
Hell no, it's not worth that. We don't even know. I know plenty of people who publish consistently and don't see a return from it. So it is not a guarantee. And here's the hidden truth beneath all of that. Everyone is consistent. Even if you don't think of yourself as consistent, you're consistent in important ways.
That's because you have a personality. You have patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing that are consistent by default. We call these cognitive, emotional, and behavioral schema. For instance, you hit a plot hole in [00:08:00] your book. What do you do? Your reaction, whatever it is, is probably pretty consistent each time.
Let's say your friend calls you out of the blue during your writing time. Whether you pick up for that person or not is probably pretty consistent.
Someone with a bit of industry prestige asks you to join an anthology. Your emotional response will be pretty consistent with other times this has happened. So our patterns of personality are consistent when we zoom out and stop defining consistency in terms of timeframes and output. I had a friend send me a meme the other day, and this is a good friend who knows me well, so no need to get offended on my behalf, but it was one of those like text memes, like a tweet or a thread or something.
And it said, Hey, my curse has been lifted. Want to hang out? He said, this is what being friends with me is like, and like, I can't, I can't argue, I can't, it's too [00:09:00] accurate, you know? Uh, so my good friends know that sometimes I get in over my head with life and maybe the depression kicks in and all my energy goes toward just keeping my business from collapsing in on itself.
So as far as they're concerned, I kind of. Go dark, I disappear. Then one day I resurface and text, you know, everyone I know, Hey, sorry I've been quiet. Depression at work. Let's hang out soon. And yeah, sometimes it's also a curse and I have a story about how I had to go see a brujo or psychic to get it lifted.
Even in my inconsistency. You see enough consistency that astute and caring friends recognize that sometimes I disappear for a month and then resurface, and I'm still eager to be their friend. It's nothing personal. Claire is just like this.
When you look at your life in this way, you'll start to see all the ways you're consistent, along with those ways that you feel inconsistent.
You're both things. So Enneagram work is about noticing our many, many consistent patterns and asking if that consistency is working for us anymore, [00:10:00] or if we want to be mischievously inconsistent and try something new. Speaking of the Enneagram, there are going to be types that prefer the traditional kind of consistency that do something over time every day until small efforts turn into large rewards kind of consistency.
And there are going to be types that just naturally want to vomit thinking about that.
If you're a 2, 4, 7, or 8, You're going to naturally have built in resistance to this narrow idea of consistency, but it's for different reasons by type. So 2s struggle with consistency in their schedule, usually because the people around them struggle with it. So if a 2 hasn't done work around their emotional boundaries, then their ability to stick to any kind of schedule is going to depend on everyone else's ability to stick to the 2's schedule, which is Just not going to work.
It's not going to happen. Mathematically, it's not going to happen. So let's say the 2 has 10 family members or good friends who rely on them regularly. And [00:11:00] that's maybe a low estimation for a 2. What are the odds that none of them will call, text, or ask for help during the 2's designated writing time?
That is, if the two even has allowed themselves to have designated writing time. Just putting that on the schedule might feel selfish to a two. So sometimes twos relegate their writing and marketing time to whenever they can fit it in between people needing them. And then, surprise, surprise, they go days without it happening.
Because there's a whole tag team of people in your life who need you, right? And then when the two does have some time to themselves, All they can focus on is the problems and needs of other people anyway because that's where their attention has been flowing all Those pathways are very strong and wide open.
Consistency for a two might look like silencing their phone or putting it in another room between certain hours of the day when nobody will die if they are unreachable. If you have a kid in school, [00:12:00] make sure there's another adult listed as the emergency contact besides you. It won't feel good at first.
It'll feel selfish. It'll feel irresponsible. It'll feel like you're letting people down. But if you want to write the book, you have to protect your emotional boundaries. And the way to do that is to not have constant reminders of everyone else's needs. Cause that is the first place your attention will flow.
So you gotta cut it off just temporarily. Don't worry. People won't be mad at you. And if they are, that's their problem. but probably it will be fine every single time you do this. And the only way to find out is to test it out. Fours are the type that I see beat themselves up over being inconsistent the most because they hold this fantasy idea of what consistency would do for them.
But listen up fours, you're not built for it. And that's just as it should be. Your job, your contribution as a writer is to think outside of the box, explore the unusual and [00:13:00] the deep. And that isn't something that always works on a strict schedule. Now, I do think that a lot of fours benefit from sitting down at a scheduled time throughout the week to think about their manuscript, whether or not that leads to words or whether or not it's a set time each day.
But getting that on the calendar, because it's easy for that same gift of creative thinking to insist that it not be tethered to reality. And then suddenly the four is letting their moods dictate everything, when a little bit of wrangling would help bring the fantasy of the heart into the action reality.
But there is a difference between me telling you Put a couple hours on your calendar a few times a week to sit and focus on your book and Now you're in the creative military, brilliance starts at oh seven hundred hours, right? Big difference.
Now sevens thrive on novelty and their important contribution is to present joyful, whimsical, and interesting things to the world as authors. So to do that you have to explore, [00:14:00] dabble, experiment, But you also have to come back at some point with something to present. So the consistency trap for Seven tends to come from the way their gift of dabbling has been treated growing up.
Almost nothing about going to a traditional school and doing homework encourages that Seven's sort of dip in and dip out behavior. But Seven's are Made to break free from that, so that the rest of us don't get stuck with the same stale ideas and experiences forever. Can the strive for novelty go too far?
Absolutely. It can lead to a Seven never finishing a novel, which never leads to their core desire of satisfaction. So seeking stimulation can prevent ever feeling satisfaction. That's a very important lesson for Sevens to learn. Some rules. Transcripts can help here, but we want to make sure that the Seven is an active participant in the rulemaking [00:15:00] process.
What I mean is that maybe the rule is something like, I'll only have two works in progress ongoing at the same time. The Seven has to agree that it's a reasonable rule and stick to it. So when a new idea comes along that holds their interest, they can create a process a set of if then rules on what to do.
For instance, if I have a new book idea come along, and I'm already maxed out at my two books, I'll ask myself if I can fold the ideas into the current book or series. And if that isn't possible, then I'll give myself an hour to jot down as much of it as I can think of before putting it in an idea folder out of sight.
So there's consistency baked into this with these sort of internalized rules, but it's not the kind of consistency that makes a 7 want to crawl out of their skin. It's that balance. 8s will not follow the consistency imposed on them by other people unless they've done a lot of [00:16:00] work around their relationship to external authority, which most .
Have not, it takes, it takes a lot for an eight to start to, , work on that because they can do a lot of things to never have to work on it. Now the fun thing is when eights set a schedule for themselves to charge ahead with an audacious project, they will often rebel against their own schedule, feeling like it has become an external authority trying to control them.
Yes, eights. I see you. You want to be able to follow your gut and passion at any moment without feeling controlled, even by your past self. And that, you are pretty consistent. So you may want to grind away at a project until it's finished, rather than stopping at a set time and moving on to something else.
That's all fine. Consistency is only ever a concept meant to support you, not to control you. But you might consider that [00:17:00] not everything has to be all or nothing. If you stop before you're finished or before you've dropped over, you're practicing a lot of healthy eightness, like mercy and self compassion, and you'll see the benefits of that the next day.
Maybe taking a break before you fall over from exhaustion isn't a sign of weakness, but a sign of self mastery. Sixes and nines tend to need others involved to reach some kind of consistent routine, which It's also perfectly acceptable. No better or worse than how others achieve their own kind of consistency of actions. Just different. So, Sixes like to feel responsible for getting the tasks done, and they like to get a little recognition for being reliable.
They may also appreciate someone they trust looking at their plan and saying yeah, it looks solid.
Nine's like co working because, , being in harmony with others and feeling connected is how they can get momentum on a task. It used to boggle [00:18:00] my mind how I would start emptying the dishwasher and then John would immediately jump up from whatever he was doing to help me empty the dishwasher. So I wanted to be like, hey, this is a one person job. Go find literally anything else to clean. That was my oneness coming through. But then I recognized that as a nine, he likely had been thinking that he needed to empty the dishwasher, but it wasn't until I sort of initiated the action that he was finally able to break through the inertia and be motivated enough to get going.
The idea of doing it together and that sort of connectedness was enough motivation. Or, okay, maybe he just thinks that if I do it by myself all the time, I'll be resentful and he's trying to keep the peace, but I think it's more likely that. Nine likes doing activities along with other people.
It creates a sense of connection. So if you're a nine, don't be afraid to find people to co work with.
Ones, threes, and fives are the most likely types, I would say, to not only practice the [00:19:00] traditional idea of daily consistency of time and task I talked about, but also to preach it to others. This is a competency type thing, so don't worry too much about it. Again, there's no virtue in it, but 1s, 3s, and 5s approach conflict by trying to be more correct, efficient, or capable, respectively.
Each finds some comfort in consistency, or in appearing consistent, so they're more likely to head in that direction. Now, to be fair, I've already talked about how I don't consider myself to be highly consistent, and you're probably curious because I am a 1. There are probably a few things happening here.
First, nobody, and I mean nobody, will notice every bit of inconsistency in my schedule better than I will. Didn't complete all the tasks on my calendar before I went to bed? Oh yeah, I'm aware. Acutely aware. Now, I manage the voice in my head that reminds me how undisciplined. I [00:20:00] was each day so that it doesn't ruin my life, but it still talks to me.
It's still jabbering away. So tag today, for example, I only got five hours of sleep, which is not enough for me. I hibernate. Um, and so then when I sat down on my purple couch to do my writing, I fell asleep. I fell asleep. Bad Claire. But whatever, right? So everything's going to be fine. This is what I tell myself when my inner one, my inner critic goes, bad Claire, you fell asleep.
You're lazy. You'll never make it in this world, kid. I just say, everything's going to be fine. Nobody cares. So for me. Nobody cares is very liberating for sometimes it's not going to feel liberating, but the way I say it to myself, nobody cares. Ugh, it's such a relief. There's, I think people don't understand sometimes how ones can care so intensely about everything.
But. It is [00:21:00] true. So when I go, nobody cares, that includes me. And it's really nice. So I see the voice, I talk to it, I move on. All that said, when other people hear about how I operate my business, and maybe they, they see my calendar, they tend to classify my processes as, consistent.
I don't, but they do. And this is why comparison is useless for getting closer to the truth.
But I also think that my other eight types might be playing a role here. So we have all nine types inside of us. I'm definitely a one as my dominant type, but my second highest, I think it's, they might be tied. One might be slightly higher than the other are eight and seven. Both types that need a lot of wiggle room and can get bored with doing the same thing every day.
So I build in possibilities for that in my calendar, which is a very one way of approaching such a thing.
Clearly when I [00:22:00] talk about the type's relationship to the traditional idea of consistency, I'm speaking in generalities here. Not only because we have all nine types inside of us to varying degrees of influence, but also because we have individual biographies that influence this sort of thing. Raised in a strict military household where consistency was king, that might influence your relationship with it.
Raised as a free range kid or have to raise yourself because your parents were working or otherwise absent, that might influence your relationship with it. It's worth contemplating how our upbringing might have influenced our relationship with consistency. Putting it on a pedestal, causing us to yearn for it, or making us want to reject it altogether.
Consistency, that is, doing the same thing every day or every week for our author business, having a consistent output, is also a privilege that we don't all have. Maybe you work weird hours at your primary place of employment. Maybe you have kids. Notoriously inconsistent [00:23:00] little things, or you have an aging parent to take care of.
Sometimes I see people push away other important parts of their life simply to cling to consistency, and I don't think that's the way to find what you're truly looking for either.
And then there's chronic illness. Womp womp. No matter how much I'd like to be consistent, my mental and physical health are like Cute, but no. If you have mental or physical illness that can show up unexpectedly, tormenting yourself about how it causes you to be inconsistent really helps nothing. And is an unnecessary pattern of thinking and feeling that you are free to experiment with letting go of. Now, your brain thinks tormenting you about being inconsistent might be just the motivation you need to become consistent.
But when you look at all the evidence, [00:24:00] all that actually does is increase your stress and negative emotions, which is not useful for managing either mental or physical illness. It's, it's very bad, it's not helpful, um, and it's a lie, so you can just let it go. So if you're wondering, what if I'm not consistent, I will say, you are consistent in a lot of ways.
And in the one way you're thinking of, consistency of output, it doesn't actually matter. Not everyone is meant to be consistent in their writing and work habits on a daily basis. Now it's really useful for the bottom line of any large business or corporation if they can rely on consistent human output, and so we get that shit shoved down our throats as Virtuous in this large scale pro capitalist propaganda campaign, but a lot of us do our best work in this world if we stop worrying about consistent output.
What builds a [00:25:00] business is progress over time, but it doesn't have to average out to the same amount of progress every day, week, month, or even year. Castigating and berating ourselves because we don't feel consistent enough with our output and efforts doesn't motivate us the way we think it will. It mostly causes us pain and damages our relationship with ourselves.
Believe it or not, our life will be better if we just let that go. Just think about it. When was the last time talking shit to yourself made you feel genuinely better in your life? You are consistently you in ways you probably don't even see. But your friends do, your readers do, you for the ways you are consistently you. If you feel like you're not accomplishing enough in your career, first challenge yourself to define what the hell enough even looks like and where you concocted that idea.
It might be [00:26:00] super arbitrary and not stand up to even basic scrutiny. So if after you do that, you still feel like some of your consistent patterns are no longer ones you want to keep up, and you're open to trying new ones, come book a session with me, and I can give you the personalized attention and direction you're looking for.
What works for one person will not work for another, so let's figure out what works for you. That's it for this week's episode of What If for Authors. I'm Claire Taylor. Still, consistently Claire Taylor. Uh, thanks for joining me each week. Or maybe you wait for a few weeks and then you binge episodes. It ain't about consistency.
I appreciate you listening whatever you do. I hope you'll join me for the next episode whenever you get around to it. Happy writing.