Getting motivated

Why is motivation the hardest thing for a writer—or even just a creative person no matter what their medium? We are doing what we love to do. We get great satisfaction from it both internally and externally (hopefully) and it fills a need deep within us.

Most people don’t write because they want to be famous and earn a lot of money. If they start out with that goal in mind, they’re going to be disappointed because it takes usually years and many, many books to begin to get any sort of recognition or monetary return on our hard work—as Cathy Maxwell has said, there are many much easier ways of earning money than writing.

We write because we need to. Because we’ve got a story to tell, and characters in our heads that need a way out.

So why is it so hard to just sit down and write?

I don’t know about you, but I’m always finding excuses not to write. I’ve got to do some formatting (except the client did say that there was no rush to get the job done, but I’ll do it anyway); I’ve got to do some marketing (read fool around on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for a couple of hours, more if I head over to Tumblr as well). I really should do this, or that. Hell, I’ve even run errands rather than sit myself down and write.

Why?

It makes absolutely no sense. And yet… there it is.

So we cope. We create strategies to motivate ourselves:

We participate in NaNoWriMo.
We make deals with ourselves—if I write so many words, I’ll get X (something yummy) or get to play for Y minutes.
We work with other people doing writing sprints or other such incentives—peer pressure is motivating.

These can be great mechanisms to get ourselves writing. After listening to a terrific podcast on Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn where she interviewed Mark McGuinness, who has a book out on motivation for creatives, I picked up a few more ideas which I want to try. They’re a little deeper than the ones mentioned above:

Commit to a time when you are going to write. At that time sit down, turn off your wifi and just write (or stare out the window, but writing is better). When the time is done, you’re done. That’s it! Do it again tomorrow. See what you end up with because if you’re just going to sit there, well, you might as well write something!
Compare yourself to the best writers in your genre. This isn’t to make yourself feel bad.