“Force yourself to dive into the basics day after day, until you’re good enough to riff and produce greatness under a wide variety of circumstances.”

—Paraphrase of Bruce Lee, Musashi, Stephen King, and every other person that understood tradition well enough to buck it.

Ironically, being able to drop “quality novelty” on a dime requires the artist to carve out regular blocks of time in pursuit of their craft.  It requires the artist to discipline themselves to tap the force of creation (or at least think about it) day after day…after day after day after day ad infinitum, contemplating how to best express timeless themes within a novelty-infused, mind-catching construct.

Writing for others means being able to instantiate themes/philosophies through multiple perspectives and characters…in my opinion, this is more than a practical necessity; it’s the core requirement of every artist and mystic who wants to transcend the dualities of good and evil.  It is the core activity which fosters compassion, for in executing it, you hammer home the fact that you may have turned out to be that which you hate or love…

If not for fate, which could easily have made you into them or them into you.

When you are a writer (or any form of artist), I think you end up skating the madness-infused edges of possibility, catching glimpses of a fantastical truth, which—if consumed in the proper fashion—can make you saner than those around you.

I believe that the imagination of a writer must be trained as thoroughly as the body of an athlete, and so I create and draft on a regular basis.  Because while the reader doesn’t expect me to have “been there done that” regarding the events in my books, they must be left with a visceral enjoyment of what I have written.

And that visceral enjoyment is a function of how well I’ve trained my imagination.

IMHO, the key to reliably producing quality results means combining “speed of perception” with consistent audacity.  The faster you perceive what fits in your story, and the more audacious you are in instantiating it, the higher the pay-off for your audience, and the faster you can cycle on to a better project, which in turn causes your skills to grow with increasing rapidity.  Others will look at you and dismiss you as lucky or talented, but in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

At this point, I believe you have simply honed your perception and audacity to such a degree that it can convincingly masquerade as luck or talent. 

To me, being an author is 20% reading (research), 80% daily word count, and 0% waiting for inspiration.

There is no inherent salvation in structure.  Adhering to structure can often lead to effective action, which can induce a positive course of events, but structure alone is not enough.  One must be EFFECTIVE.  And to do that, one must constantly question whether the structure is serving them…or if they’re serving the structure.  

For me, the premise behind living a disciplined life is so that when order breaks down, or reality turns into an ambiguous soup of opportunity/peril, you have the basics covered well enough so that you can focus on making big, audacious leaps.  Discipline is not an end in and of itself—if that stance is taken, it becomes little more than a prison.  In my mind, when discipline is properly utilized, it becomes a key that unlocks the door to your cell so you can escape into the fresh blue yonder.