Rules. Alarms. White-knuckle power. Self-imposed torture, because, let’s face it, sometimes you don’t trust yourself to do it. But it’s not actually like that.

The discipline that stays with you? It comes from love.

I am an ultrarunner. Like it or not, I love to run. Unlike other runners whose bodies are like finely tuned machines running on lean protein, demanding early starts and a 7:45 p.m. bedtime because – training – I run because somewhere around mile four, maybe five, the world around me makes sense.

For a few seconds.

But getting there costs something. Last winter I stood in my driveway at 5 a.m., headlamp on, breath hanging in the air, every reasonable part of me arguing for the warm bed I’d just left. Twenty-eight degrees. Pitch black. Nobody would know if I went back inside. Nobody but me. So I ran. Two miles of my body filing complaints, and then —

Noises rattling around inside me go quiet. Solutions I am seeking? I find them right there, in that space between four and five miles. The pain in the first two miles is worth it, it’s the price of admission, giving me full access to ideas and thoughts I didn’t know I had.

It’s the same whenever I sit down to write. A birthday message. A short text. Or a full-length novel, like the one I’m working on that has over 30,000 words right now. It’s not unusual to open the file and read flat dialogue, dialogue I wrote mind you, and wonder what happened. It’s got no heart. No blood. No life. It’s not mine. So I think. Every part of me says come back tomorrow. Start fresh. You can do more, later.

There’s a chapter in this novel I rewrote four times. Each time I opened it I wanted to delete the whole thing and pretend it never existed. But the character in it wasn’t finished. She had something to say that I hadn’t let her say yet, and walking away meant she’d never get to say it.

Instead, I choose to stick with it. At its worst the story wants to live, the characters want to say what they’ve been trying to say, that only I can bring that out in them. The love of the process is stronger than the fear of not getting it right.

Stubbornness can feel like discipline, but without the love of what you do? Stubbornness’s emotional engine will eventually run out of gas. That’s when frustration kicks in and you turn off everything, shut it down and quit. It lets you quit, after it runs out of gas. Discipline? It won’t let you because you never run out of gas. The memory of what a good sentence feels like, the emotional impact of a solid e-mail or love letter. That’s what happens after months and years of working so hard that it looks easy to those around you.

Those who quit running after the second mile? Did they want it? Or did they do it because they thought they wanted to? Love of what you do. That’s where it starts. Knowing what the finish line will feel like. Or the final submission. Is it worth it to keep going?