The Road to Discipline Addendum
Mark Brown
July 5, 2022
The Road to Discipline is the most challenging written project I have ever done. The papers I wrote during my last semester at Drake in 2008 compare well based on the amount of research I had to do to complete them. I have had the blog up for nearly a year and I have both remembered writing lessons from the past and learned new ones during that time. I have made some realizations while writing the particular set of entries on the blog that are pertinent to the subject of The Road to Discipline, writing in general and even perhaps the future of the blog itself. Today’s entry will be about them. Other entries I make from this point could be about matters concerning discipline, but my drive to create a treatise about the subject has been sated for the time being.
The most fascinating part of the process to writing The Road to Discipline was how it ended up becoming what it was. The only idea called “The Road to Discipline” in my blog ideas notecard on my phone is the first one. It was indeed about what I wrote it about. I looked at my growing list of ideas and found that discipline was at the heart of them. Chapters 3-7 were ideas I had already stashed away for later. They’d been there for awhile and just needed to be ordered properly for best use in the grand scheme. The content of them was very thought out after the decision was made to make the original thought fit into the bigger picture. Chapters 8-11 were intentionally developed after I committed to finishing the accidental treatise. In many ways it resembles very precisely how my approach to strength training has evolved over the years.
Writing it helped me develop better writing discipline because it pointed my entries towards a specific direction. My blog has alway leaned towards strength training but has always been a scattershot of ideas that come to me. There is value in both the expected and unexpected from a content point of view. Releasing Road pieces on Tuesday allowed my brain to get my thoughts on discipline out on self imposed schedule while also developing other smaller ideas without a set schedule. It’s possible I could have written The Road to Discipline like how I wrote about deadlifts to the same effect but it had more power to me in my own mind that I was committing fully to concept.
The most important thing writing this series forced me to do was to tie different ideas together into one cohesive vision. My blog has entries that are split into multiple parts. Almost all of them were written as one piece but became 2 parts because they ended up being a bit too long to unleash as one entry. I learned last year that leaning towards shorter than longer is better for entries in a blog. That lesson was important because it informs me how I want to write a piece destined for the blog. If I am writing and I see it going above 4-5 pages in Pages, I will look for logical places in the piece to split it up. The other version of this is the 4 entries I’ve done on deadlifts. They all tackled individual aspects of deadlifts that I see need to be addressed in training, especially the last 2. They weren’t the same idea but the subject matter was related one central idea.
What The Road to Discipline did was take that concept and increased the volume and difficulty. In that way, it’s the concept of progressive overload being used organically to consciously improve my writing skill. If one only writes singular idea writing pieces, making two or more independent pieces connect well will be more difficult and be more time consuming. The subject matter helped me write the piece. Parts 3-7 being independent ideas already in my head forced me to come up with a the structure for Road fairly early on despite writing each individual piece week to week. The questions of why which individual ideas go before others needed to be only justified to me, the writer. One of the biggest takeaways for me is is that those questions would have to be answered to editors or other figures in other circumstances. It is something to be mindful of when writing.
Once the structure was set, connecting the independent essays together using discipline as the tether to bind them became harder to do as I thought of the ideas for the latter stages of Road. Parts 8-11 are probably the hardest writing challenges I’ve had in years. It’s not something I was capable of producing last year when I started the blog. Tying multiple independent essays together while marching towards a greater conclusion isn’t something I had planned to do on the blog. It just happened. Writing the essays and publishing them over the period of 10 weeks made me really think what my conclusion was. I can understand why some start with the conclusion and work backwards, but it was beneficial to me to constantly question what I writing about. The important part was that getting the structure stabilized in the middle allowed me to really concentrate on the bigger picture. That’s something that writing individual essays can’t help train.
The Road to Discipline also had the effect of clearing my growing list of ideas. A back log had developed that needed to worked through. My writing discipline has grown over the last couple months, especially since I self imposed a schedule of release dates on myself. That strategy has definitely improved how I write and how I structure my week. Making Tuesdays the day a Road chapter was released held my feet to the fire. It made me prioritize writing some essays over others. I developed the idea for equipment reviews during the writing of Road to be a piece for the blog that didn’t take as much mental energy to write, finish and post as scheduled. The reviews are some of the shorter essays I write because there’s just less meat on the bone to chew, so to speak.
I didn’t intend to write a treatise about anything on my blog. Bob Ross would be pleased, I’m sure. I’m happy I took the challenge that was literally sitting in front of my face and came out of it with something I am proud of. There will be more of these in the future. The lessons I have gotten from writing The Road to Discipline helped my writing discipline and understanding a bit more of the direction my blog is headed. I hope everyone sticks around.
Life Through Lifting 