How do you motivate yourself to write? · 8:39pm Jul 10th, 2015
I used to write a thousand words of fiction every day. It was easy. A thousand words was nothing. It didn't have to be good, and it usually wasn't. Editing is for making words good. Writing is just for making words. I didn't have a schedule. I wrote whenever I felt like. I didn't get anything out of it. Usually no one read them but me. Sometimes I wrote off prompts, and sometimes I just wrote whatever, and sometimes I wrote off an outline, and sometimes I continued some story I'd already started. It wasn't necessarily fun. I was never excited about it. I never had any passion for writing. It always felt like work. But I did it anyway. It was satisfying in the way that cleaning or jogging or cooking can be satisfying. Even when you're not doing it well, it feels like something important is being accomplished.
Over the past year, my productivity has petered out to nothing. I don't even write a thousand words a week. I can't think of anything that's changed in the past few months. I wrote a little less and a little less and now I just don't. I don't clean or jog or cook much anymore either, but it's hard to find a connection there.
It's not writer's block. It's not frustration. It's not depression. I just don't feel like doing it anymore, but life feels sort of blank without a hobby. I'd like to write again, if only to have the satisfaction of creating something again. But I open up word documents and write a hundred words or so and it feels pointless.
Anyway, I figure asking other people is hardly the worst thing I can do.
It's a generic question that professional writers get tired of being asked and serious writers roll their eyes at:
How do you motivate yourself to write?
If nothing else, I enjoy listening to writers talk about writing, and I'll take any chance I get to do so.
Maybe I should just go read a self help book instead.
I like watching numbers go up.
Writing lets me watch numbers go up.
More seriously... I get what you mean by things feeling empty without a hobby. I do actually like writing, and I actually find it much more satisfying than jogging or cooking. But I may be a weird fish; I tell myself stories constantly in my head.
Incessantly.
Pretty much any time I'm not focused on doing something else specifically - and sometimes when I am - I'm telling myself stories.
So when I write, it is more just an extension of my primary hobby, I guess.
My real motivation is that it means that at the end of the day, I have more than I did at the start, and I made a difference. The world is forever changed!
Over time, I've developed the opinion that writing is not something that should be forced. Creativity is not a faucet, to be turned on and off at will. All the times where I emphasized output over competence never felt like a good use of my time afterward.
At the same time, however, creating the circumstances for writing is the writer's responsibility. For me, actually writing involves sitting down and having the document open. No video games, no telling myself "I'll write later", no homework hanging over my head that I need to do afterward.
--Tom Robbins
Beyond the actual logistics of it, one also needs to be attached to their writing in order to follow through on it. Writing is work; it's a unique hobby, that way. It is not satisfying in and of itself, nor is it fun. The idea of the story needs to be something you like, that you want to see, and that you haven't seen before. Otherwise, there's no point to working on it.
I can't write any old thing, because without attachment there's no reason to write. That's one reason I don't write porn much anymore; it always feels derivative and pointless. That's also why I almost never write anything with the Random tag. If you're having trouble writing, perhaps reconsider if the things you were working on were really interesting to you, or if you were just writing to write.
There you go: a generic answer to a generic question, from someone who is terrible at writing consistently.
!k words in the morning, 1k words in the evening. I treat it like brushing my teeth, just something you do lol.
The only way to get past it just write. If you're writing about something you're passionate about, it'll start to show.
I like listening to music while I write. Makes it feel more fun for me.
I have exactly the same issue as you, really – where it's not depression or any particularly noticeable change other than that you just stop doing it. I haven't written anything at all over the last few weeks, but before then I was writing quite a bit.
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That's a really nice comment, and sums up my own feelings on the matter beyond "I just try to get in the mood for it.", which is what i end up telling people a lot.
A few things. First and foremost, I feel guilty if I don't write for too long. I have a hierarchy of "worthiness" for activities: passive amusement (TV, video games, reading fiction) is worth less than active/social/educational amusement (going for a walk, spending time with friends, reading nonfiction) is worth less than creating something. If I spend too much time doing something worth less, I start to feel bad that I could be using that time to make something (which usually means writing.)
On occasion I start to feel guilty, but there's nothing I particularly want to write. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting started and/or finished something, and at those points writing a minific works to jumpstart me. A few times I've been stuck to the point where not even that does anything, and I've found I have an input/output problem: I wrote so much that I kind of drained all of my best ideas, and I need to input some good ideas to slosh around. That can be reading something good (especially fiction), listening to music, watching a TV show or movie, anything that gives my brain some new toys to start playing with. That usually ends up giving me a new idea, or angle, or "trick" I want to try or explore. (Fair warning, though, it rarely helps finish projects you already started.)
I tend to only get writing done when it's the only way to keep myself busy. I used to take my laptop with me on the bus to school, and with no wi-fi and 90 minutes to get through, I was cranking out words like no tomorrow (somewhat)
Do you find that you're not really taking pleasure in much of anything these days? That's anhedonia, and although it's not the totality of depression, it's one of the bigger symptoms and when I realize 'huh i'm not enjoying really anything enough to actually DO it' is when I know it's time to get back on the meds. Sometimes a cigar is just a bleak, slow incidence of chronic depression that you ignore until it becomes undeniable.
3226582 Thanks
I actually spent a good chunk of my college years only writing academically; I didn't have the motivation or time to write fiction. So not writing is something I have experience with. I imagine most writers do.
3226612 This makes me think of one of my own stories. Back when I first discovered Parks and Recreation, I binged the entire series on Netflix. During that period, all the new things I wrote were character-driven comedies. When the binge ended, so did a lot of my motivation to keep working on those stories.
More recently, one of the people I edit for took a break from one story because he had just watched Over the Garden Wall and felt like doing some dark fantasy story as a result.
I think it's less a question of idea and technique, and more a question of mood. The art and entertainment that one consumes is going to affect state of mind, in some way or another. Writing is so subjective that I don't think that the connection between what you consume and what you write is ever so explicit as copying ideas or techniques or execution. Perhaps theme and mood and archetypes, yes, but anything more specific is impossible to track concretely. Especially when comparing inspiration from one medium to a product from another (like TV to prose).
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I think it can be any or all of the above; my original fiction novel ended up set in a vaguely 1930's AU because I was stuck on it and I watched the show Carnivàle, and thought "hmm, that would be a twist on kings and quests." The original idea for it came from reading Terry Pratchett, liking the witches books, and wanting to write something more serious about magic users in that style-- it ended up worlds apart, but the idea seed was planted by Discworld.
On a fanfic note, A Moonlight Torture (in my minific collection) is based directly on the song Untouchable Face by Ani DiFranco, Disney's Hercules gave me Dash's "I don't do love" problem in Best Young Flyer, and Three Little Apples is a combination of Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) and Ballet Shoes (Noel Streatfeild.) Rainbow Dash's relationship to her father in Of Cottages and Cloud Houses is based on the relationship between Kevin's dad and sister in The Wonder Years.
Stories are made of a lot of pieces. While taking a whole story and putting a new coat of paint on it is lazy, taking something you like from one story and sticking it in another is going to shift things so much that it becomes its own thing. That could be a tone, a setting, a style (if you watch Pulp Fiction, and think it's a cool idea, there's no reason not to try your hand at an out of order narrative,) a type of character interaction, or even the basic ideas of a character. Sometimes you just need a new one of any of those to get yourself excited to try something you haven't.
I gave myself the goal to publish one story or chapter a month. I've been sticking to it for some reason, probably because I like seeing numbers go up, too. :B
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I've always found watching the numbers go up to be, by a very wide margin and without any exception I can think of, the most vastly dissatisfying aspect of the whole shebang. But maybe that's just because the numbers never seem to do what I tell them.
How do the stories in your head compare to the ones that end up on the screen?
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I thought that was supposed to be, like, the whole point.
Ray Bradbury strongly believed that quantity inevitably becomes quality, and urged writers to write at least one story a week, by the same principle that if you shoot a basketball over and over and over again eventually you start making baskets. Bradbury also had an incredible overwhelming enthusiasm for writing and his stories, which I guess reinforces your 'gotta be attached to your writing' point. But if I only ever wrote when I had an idea I felt attached to, I'm pretty sure my productivity would be about as low as it is right now.
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I've read in more than one place that the 'hierarchy of worthiness' thing is the wrong way of looking at the world, but it makes so much sense that it's hard to ignore. It'd be very difficult to argue against that watching tv and dicking around on the internet aren't the least valuable activities possible, or just that creating isn't inherently much more valuable than consuming, for like a million reasons.
But feeling guilty over not doing something you have no obligation to do is apparently the wrong way of going about things. Hard cycle to break out of, though.
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Dude, cigars are gross.
I also don't understand how to smoke them. Suck in without inhaling? That's freaking insanity.
But writing was never something I got much pleasure from. The satisfaction was always in having a completed story that didn't exist before. And then disappointment after rereading it and realizing how terrible it was. And then satisfaction again after revisions were done.
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I'm pretty sure all the best things I've ever written were directly inspired by something else. Writing is always best when you've just discovered some new toy in another story that you want play with. Writing's kind of like puppies that way. They're at their most fun when they're new, and at their least fun when they're shitting all over stuff. And it's really just the worst when you have to cut things out of them.
On the other end of things, anytime I start writing a story with the words, 'I'm going to make this entirely my own thing this time!' ends up being boring to work on. Maybe playing with other people's toys is inherently more fun than playing with our own toys.
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Hey, I've been doing that, too! I don't think I've missed a month since last October, though I have no idea how. Pretty sure this is the month that'll be breaking my streak.
Anyway, I appreciate all the thoughtful replies! Reading about writing is more fun than writing.
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This is a good thing, really; I think my love of numbers going up is unhealthy. I can waste a lot of time doing it.
The ones on screen are invariably better, because they're much better thought-out and executed.
I actually derive pleasure from reading my own stories. I go back through my own stuff and read some of my stories and feel good about it. What inspired me to finish up Forever and Again and Again was rereading it and being like "Man, this is good, why don't I finish it?"
That's how I feel about a lot of my stuff, really; I'm my own biggest fan. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it simply is.
I think this is right; in my own experience, making a habit out of doing something means that I do it. I've managed to get something (a review post, a story) posted every day for the last week, and I'm pretty sure it is only because I said I would and decided to make it a habit.
Before that, I had hardly done anything productive in months because I'd made a habit of doing other things.
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I actually share the same sort of "hierarchy of worthiness" thing.
Guilt is a powerful motivating factor. When I feel obligated to do things, I get stuff done and feel like I'm making progress. It is just a question of choosing to feel obligated to do things that don't make you feel miserable. When I do things that are empty, I end up frustrated that I'm just doing nothing of consequence; when I do fulfilling things, it makes me feel awesome.
Like, writing writeoff stories? Always makes me happy.
Posting stories to FIMFiction? Happy.
Reviewing stuff makes me happy as well.
Or... at least accomplished? The two kind of blur together. It is a good feeling, though.
3226733 I like it when someone agrees with me and disagrees with me at the same time
I wasn't disputing the idea, but rather the notion that it is so easily trackable and discreet. See below for more.
3227478 Well, that's the tricky thing about writing advice; the process is as subjective and varied as the product. I suppose that might be why so many writers give out such similar advice.
For me, writing is often about discreet concepts and plots. My most recent posted story on this account came from one line in a song ("Tried to sell my soul last night / funny, he wouldn't even take a bite.") My brain latched onto that, and formed a plot around it. When I sat down to write, my only concern was making that one line make sense, to represent it in an actual plotline, rather than a song unconcerned with rationalism and logic. If You Came to Conquer started as a way to complain/respond to a bunch of time travel tropes I didn't like.
On the other hand, I've also written stories where the most interesting aspect of it (to me) was trying a new execution or technique. “Princest Is Wincest,” It Said was more about experimenting with the amount and density of description versus dialogue, rather than the plot or characters.
Obviously, things are going to mutate and change as the story is written. But for me, that initial idea is where I fall in or out of love with a story. The buildup to a new story may be long or short, but it involves some sort of theory crafting, worldbuilding, and testing. If it doesn't work or goes nowhere, then I would rather drop it than try to force out some writing I'm not interested in.
I think of creativity as a sort of abstract resource. It can be pooled, it can be refreshed, but above all it can be spent and wasted. Maybe it's like blood; it regenerates slowly over time, and certain things increase its production.
Writing demands practice, certainly. In that case, quantity can have its merits. But just like practicing at any other thing, motivation is key. If you do something too much, it becomes an unpleasant chore, and things which are creative in nature are especially susceptible to this.
We can't all be an Issac Asimov or Stephen King. They could donate at the blood bank of creativity 10 times in one day and keep going. For me, I'd rather pour myself into one project I can be briefly proud of, let my creativity regenerate, then do it again later (and hate it a year later, but that's a separate discussion). I have enough ideas to choose from that I never have to worry about working on something that doesn't interest me.
Your process might be different. I imagine it is very much so. But sometimes a different perspective can provide insight despite the differences
3227548 You go back and read your own stories for fun too, eh? I do that too, though mostly for phrasing and descriptions; it's rather harder to appreciate pacing and plotting when they are the opposite of a surprise.