Discipline, not excuses, makes a writer.

“In the imagination and dreams of people who are cut off from the world, words are ballet dancers. – Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997)

If you think that writing is too difficult, that you don’t have enough time, or that you’re not in the right mindset, consider Jean-Dominique Bauby. He wrote an entire book, one letter at a time, by blinking his left eye.

Monsieur Bauby was a journalist for Elle magazine, a man who lived fast and reveled in the glam world of fashion and media. Then, at the age of 43, the life he cherished vanished in a tragic twist of fate. He suffered a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome—fully conscious, completely paralyzed, unable to speak, move, or even breathe without assistance. The only part of his body he could control was his left eyelid.

That single functioning eyelid became his writing tool. A transcriber would hold up a card with the French alphabet, beginning with the most frequently used letters. When they reached the letter he wanted, he would blink—one letter at a time. Those letters slowly formed words, which then evolved into sentences. Using this painstaking method, he composed an entire 132-page memoir—some 200,000 blinks in total.

The result was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a beautifully written, concise meditation on memory and imagination—and a harrowing account of being trapped inside his own inert body. It became a bestseller and remains one of the most remarkable literary achievements in history.

Whenever I feel like writing is too much of a chore or when I tell myself I don’t have time, I think about this extraordinary writer. He had a legitimate excuse not to write, but he refused to pity himself. “Other than my eye, two things aren’t paralyzed: my imagination and my memory,” he wrote. Each morning, he felt “a supreme pleasure—that of being Jean-Dominique Bauby.”

If Jean-Do could write under those conditions, what legitimate excuses do the rest of us have?