“Well, you know, I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions,” I tell my friend as we sit on the tatami mats in the long dining room of a Buddhist monastery on our last day in Kyoto. We’re getting ready to go home and re-enter real life.
“But,” I continue, “I decided this year to only work on one project. No distractions. And I set a goal to finish the first draft of the manuscript by the end of the year.”
I read somewhere that the industry standard length for an adult historical fiction novel like mine is between 100,000 and 120,000 words. In July of 2025, over halfway through the year, I should have passed the 50,000 word mark.
“I just passed 40,000 words,” I confide in my friend. “But I think I can catch up in September if I block off weekends for a focused, solo writing retreat.”
Unless you are Brandon Sanderson (who I’m sure has made some sort of dubious deal with a non-human entity), writing is a hungry passion that snarfs time—messy and inefficient. For nearly two decades, I have written in response to what has felt like a strong and urgent calling. In that time, I have begged, borrowed, and stolen hours from every other area of my life. Countless frenzied late nights and dragging, foggy mornings. I’ve said “no” to volunteer opportunities, social gatherings, and other hobbies. For most of 2025, I spent most sunny Sunday afternoons typing for three and four-hour stretches.
“Writers write.” That’s what they tell you at all of the conferences and in most of the books. Buckle down. Do the work.
In a culture that is always looking for the magic bullet—the diet, the workout rhythm, the hack, the tip, the secret sauce—perhaps we venerate nothing quite so much as discipline.
Discipline will keep the weight off. Discipline will make the money, save money. Discipline will ward against the seductive power of the doom scroll. Discipline will sanctify.
Discipline often goes hand-in-hand with self-denial. And most of the classic resolutions aim to shave off, give up, or forego. We know, psychologically, that habits are more successfully replaced than broken. So, many of our human goals avoid solely focusing on restriction and instead strive for dutiful consistency–gritting through. If you run enough, it will get easier. If you stretch through pain, you will become flexible. If you pray and read your Bible, eventually God will speak.
At the first writing conference I ever attended, I asked the workshop leader—a productive, published author—”How do you get over writer’s block?”
“I can’t afford to get writer’s block,” the speaker replied. “If I get stuck, I go back to my characters, and I interview them, figure out what they would do in whatever situation I’ve written them into.”
Grit on through. God will speak.
Of course, there is the other kind of writer, those for whom publication, marketability, making money, etc. are not the goal. Art for the sake of art. Writing primarily for the writer or for the process of writing.
I’ll admit, I’ve always felt some scorn for this writing philosophy. What’s the point of telling a story if no one listens? What of all the sacrifices one makes to carve out the time? And if writing is your gift, your love, or your purpose, can you really be satisfied or sustained either artistically or practically through secret practice in spare moments stolen from your real job and your real life?
I don’t want to be a sellout. I’ve read good stories cut, mangled, shoehorned like a stepsister’s foot into the mold of marketability. While working as an editorial assistant, I saw many brilliant stories fail to escape the slush pile and helped produce soulless products that were indistinguishable from everything else. The Market is a terrible master. And those who cast off its demands and write for themselves know something true and good—that’s it’s all nothing without love.
I do love writing. It’s my job, and some of my volunteer work, and my hobby, and the means by which I maintain relationships. Occasionally people ask why I write. More often people ask what I’m passionate about. The answer is the same: writing makes me feel alive. It’s the strong current beneath the ice, calm and powerful, a kind of steady thunder. Writing feels like standing tall and rolling your shoulders back, the electric sense of alignment, of finally being how you were meant to be, and being able to really fill your lungs.
I write for “the zone.” Maybe I’m a hedonist. Maybe “hedonist” is a pretentious word for lazy and undisciplined. Maybe I’m not actually that good at writing. But I don’t think there’s any possibility that the reason I have accomplished nothing spectacular in writing is a lack of love.
In the long term, I think love will carry me farther even than discipline.
Resolutions or goals, anything that focuses on the end result, burn like paper. Even the most important, meaningful, desirable end result is simply temporary fuel. Spiritually, physically, artistically, paper won’t sustain flame.
Discipline is dry wood, and it is better. But if it’s not fed by love and joy, eventually, even discipline will fizzle.
Love burns like coal, or perhaps, in some cases, like something nuclear. Love stirs and fades by turns, changing shape and color. But, darn it, it does hold on.
My novel is currently just over 53,000 words. I have balled up my paper goal to finish the manuscript in 2026. I have stacked up the dry wood of habits around it. I have found the hot ember of love, and I will keep blowing on it.
Today, I will write because I love it. And we’ll see how far that gets me.
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
