I made an appointment with Writing. And I kept it.

Ask a long distance runner how he approaches training and somewhere in there, you’ll hear the phrase, “I run when I feel like it and when I don’t.”

The singer, the musician, the artist. They’ll all tell you that they have a sort of love-hate relationship with their craft. And sometimes, they don’t want to do it, but to grow, learn, and change, they devote time to the song, the music, and the art when inspiration comes quick and easy and when it doesn’t.

It’s the same with writing. It’s kind of the cardinal rule. Anne Lamott tells us to write every day, even if it’s just 10 minutes of terrible writing. The point is the discipline, the act of sitting down at that computer or in front of that piece of paper and writing something—anything—for a few minutes. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or if anyone ever reads it. It just matters that you write. That you invest in the craft and the talent. That you don’t silence the voice inside you that calls you to write, to create.

One of my goals of sorts this year is to write more, and not just for this blog. Earlier in the year, I was doing great at sitting down almost every evening and writing for an hour or 45 minutes. But with a lot of upheaval at work, stress, anxiety, and other pressures, that’s been much more difficult lately. So this weekend, I made a writing appointment with myself. At 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, I’d get up from my nap, wander into the guest room/office, sit at my meager little desk and write for an hour or so.

When 3 p.m. came, I didn’t want to write. Sure, I’d been excited about it, but sometimes I’m excited about long runs, too, until it’s actually time to do the work. And writing is romantic until you have to actually do it. Then, it’s a lot of work and discipline with short bursts of creativity. At least that’s the way it’s been for me lately.

But on Sunday afternoon, I made myself keep that appointment. At first, the writing was hard. I didn’t know what to write about, so I started typing up a journal entry I’d written a week or so earlier. Then, I started writing another story from my memory and another. Before too long it was 5 p.m., a friend was texting about our plans for the evening, and I had to stop, but I didn’t want to.

I may not have written anything worth publishing in those two hours. Someday soon when I start going through the nearly 10,000 words I’ve written in an attempt to write a cookbook featuring recipes and stories about my family, I may completely rewrite or trash Sunday’s meager word count. But right now that doesn’t matter.

I made an appointment with Writing. And I kept it.