Writing–especially writing and trying to sell large projects, like novels–is a clear-cut example of an area where self-motivation is essential. While this post is written especially for writers, the techniques I’ll talk about can be applied to practically any kind of project where self-motivation is needed.

Motivating ourselves to write can be hard: blank pages stare at us implacably, or we get 75,000 words into a novel and then realize there’s a basic flaw that will require a huge rewrite, or we’ll get dozens of rejection letters for every acceptance.

Writers generally need enthusiasm for a story to do a really good job of writing it, need to sustain their involvement in a project for months or often years, and need to be able to face rejection after rejection without giving up. Even very good writers typically see many rejections before they sell their work (Stephen King, when he started his career, put a big nail in his wall and spiked each of his rejection letters on there as he went. Fortunately, it turned out well for him in the end, although he collected hundreds of rejection letters before he really got off the ground). Self-motivation is tough in this kind of environment. Here are some tools for maximizing it. These notes can be useful to any writer, but they’re mainly written with fiction in mind.

Pick Your Project Very Carefully
A certain kind of writer tends to write whatever they’re most passionate about, regardless of length, genre, marketability, and so on. Another kind of writer tends to write whatever seems to be the most salable, whatever the market seems to be crying out for. A third kind of writer tends to follow some particular pattern dictated by their writing practices, being propelled neither by passion nor by saleability but by process. All of these approaches have their good points, and each can have real drawbacks under certain circumstances. The approach I would suggest is different from all of these: it’s to put extra effort into brainstorming, then making a careful selection from the possibilities.

What I mean by this is that when it’s time to start a new project–say the last project is finished, or has been scrapped, or needs to sit in a drawer for a while before you can get any perspective on it, or this is your first novel–instead of looking for an idea for a new project, you look for a lot of ideas for new projects, using a variety of methods to come up with them. Review ideas you’ve jotted down or the ones that have been in your head. Look at some of your favorite books and see what you like most about them. Sit down and brainstorm at least two or three ideas out of the blue.

But why go to all this trouble when you have an idea you already know you’re burning to write, or that you think will sell well? Because our first ideas are often not our best ones, and a little time spent picking the right goal can save a huge amount of time working on the wrong one. It’s well worth slaving away at this brainstorming phase for a few hours even if at the end of it you opt for the idea you were interested in in the first place, if for no other reason than to understand deeply and clearly exactly why that idea is the best one for you to work on. And many times careful consideration of possibilities will yield a much better idea than anything that would have come up on its own.

Then comes the choosing. Passion counts for a lot: it’s very difficult to make a reader passionate about a book that the writer wasn’t passionate about when it was written. But other factors should probably figure in too, unless you’re only writing for yourself. Marketability? If you really want to sell your work, it would be ill-advised to ignore this unless you’re of the opinion that it’s impossible to tell what will sell. So writing a vampire novel because you love writing about vampires isn’t a bad idea, and writing a vampire novel because they’re in demand (let’s suppose) can work out well, but by far the best reason to write a vampire novel is that you’re passionate about it and someone’s clamoring to buy that kind of thing.

This applies to any decision: we often try to make choices based on one overwhelming factor, like buying something because it’s the cheapest or because we’re enchanted with it. But any of our priorities we put aside when making an important decision will come back to haunt us later. If the cheapest item breaks long before the more expensive version would have, or if the thing we’re enchanted costs so much that we end up short on the rent …

But what does choosing well have to do with self-motivation? There are two key things: first, it’s not that helpful to motivate ourselves toward a goal we don’t actually want to reach. While even working toward a wrong goal can be educational, the same can be said of working toward the right goal, and the right goal has the additional benefit of paying off, which is an educational experience in itself.

Second, if we are working toward a wrong goal, sooner or later we will realize it isn’t something we really want to achieve (or we’ll achieve it, and the expected payoff will never materialize), and then we’ll be back to zero, with the sense that work gets us nowhere.

Always Keep In Mind What Excites You
Whatever gets you excited about writing a book is worth thinking about regularly. If you find your writing has turned into drudgery and you’re just trying to slog through until the end, you’ll have a lot of trouble motivating yourself and may not produce particularly great writing either (though there can be exceptions to that last part). If you hit this point, one approach that can propel you forward is to ask yourself “What would really get me excited about this project right now that I’m not already doing?” Kill an important supporting character, cause a disaster, give the protagonist what they’ve been striving for and see them realize that it isn’t their real goal at all, add a new character who churns things up … this is another case where more excitement for the writer tends to mean more excitement for the reader. All of this has to be kept in balance with your vision for the story, but if you can’t think of anything that keeps you excited about the writing and is consistent with your vision, maybe it’s time to rethink the vision.

The exception I know of in which drudgery can yield good writing is when you know your story much better than your reader, and so what feels like old hat to you is new and fresh for the reader.

If You Stop Feeling Motivated, Retrace Your Steps
Here’s a question that can be handy in projects that seem to have lost their drive: where was my motivation when I last saw it? Sometimes feeling like you’ve lost your enthusiasm means that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe your interest in the story was being kept up by a minor character who according to your outline (if you use outlines) needed to leave the story a little while ago, but the story hasn’t interested you as much since. If so, it might be worth rethinking that decision. Maybe a character did something that violates who you were hoping for them to be, or made a choice to serve the plot instead of doing what they would really want to do if left to their own devices. Maybe you’re writing a section of the book that isn’t really needed.

Regardless, always be ready to take advantage of this great advantage of writing, that you can make a complete mess of something, but then go back and do it better and get full credit as though you had written it perfectly the first time. There’s a post on this subject on my writing blog: Avoiding Your Story

Use Support, Encouragement, and Deadlines
One of the best motivators for a project is to have a real deadline, with a real person is waiting to see your results. This can be accomplished through joining an active writer’s group, blogging about your writing and including planned deadlines, getting one or more writing buddies and reading each others’ work, signing up for a writer’s workshop for which you’ll need something to be completed by a given date, working on a project for a contest or market that has a firm deadline, or getting truly interested friends or family members to read your writing as you go. It’s powerfully motivating to realize that someone is waiting breathlessly for the next chapter of your book.

If you use this last approach, by the way, you may want to ask the person to write down any feedback they have, but only to give that feedback to you right away if it’s absolutely crucial. The rest can be collected at the end so you can consider it for the second draft. Getting constant feedback can cause constantly reworking what you have, which … well, let’s just make that subject a section to itself.

Don’t Spend All Your Time Reworking
Yes, often writing can be improved by editing or rewriting, but only to a certain point. After a while, more work on the same project will begin to suck the life out of it. Make your story as good as you can make it at the moment, then send it out without spelling errors or major problems. You can set it aside and revisit it once you have perspective, or rewrite it after a rejection if you have a major new insight about it, but don’t just keep fiddling with it it’s perfect: nothing ever is, to the best of my knowledge.

Writer’s Block Is Just Fear of Writing Something That Isn’t Good Enough
On my writing blog I have a lengthy post about writer’s block, which I’ll summarize here as it applies to motivation: it’s always possible to write something, even if that something turns out to be meandering gibberish. So writer’s block doesn’t prevent a person from writing: it makes them hesitant because they might write something bad. Since everyone writes something bad sometimes, this isn’t as dire a situation as it may feel like at the time. Screwing up is an appropriate thing to worry about with surgery or disarming bombs, but it usually just gets in the way to fret about it with something like writing. Remember, you can always fix it in the next pass, and sometimes bad writing ends up being an exploratory draft (a great term I first heard from Orson Scott Card) that will reveal exactly what you need to do to write the really great draft you’re going to put together next.

Don’t Get Too Attached
It’s hard sometimes to look at something you’ve put a lot of work into and decide to scrap it, whether it’s plans for a new business venture that isn’t going to work out, a relationship that turns out to be between the wrong two people, or a brilliant passage in a novel that doesn’t belong there. When you’re faced with these problems, take a step back and ask yourself what will really give you the best result in the long run, then keep the thing or remove it based on that choice (and if applicable, whatever responsibilities you may have taken on).

This doesn’t quite add up to “kill your darlings,” as writers are often urged to do, or as Samuel Johnson put it “wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” That’s overstating it. Some things you do that you love will just not fit in the project you’re working on, and it’s important to focus on making that project as good as it can be instead of on justifying all the great things you did along the way. Doing great things is its own justification, and it tends to be instructive as well, whether or not they work out in the end. Fortunately, contrary to Johnson’s point, sometimes great passages are doing exactly what they’re supposed to and ought to be left in.

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There’s more I could say on this subject, but I’ve covered the main recommendations I set out to cover, and future posts will have more. In the meantime, how do these recommendations work for you? And writers, what particular self-motivation issues do you run into in your writing?

Writers group photo by ShellyS.
Writing desk photo byBright Meadow

There are times when I feel a little overwhelmed with everything that is going on in my life. It’s my own fault: I have multiple, powerful interests, and follow them energetically, regularly creating new projects to add to an already busy schedule. In recent years I’ve learned to hold back, to mostly stick to just the most important and rewarding projects, but my task list is still long and varied.

This kind of life keeps me engaged and interested, and I get a lot done, but some days I feel as though there are so many things that it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, there are specific steps I can take to get back on track. There are also long-term practices I can follow to be more focused and serene in general, but I’ll tackle those in other posts.

1. Take a step back
Your first reaction to this might be “I can’t take a step back! I need to get these things done! And I’m right in the middle of ___!” That’s OK: that may be true. On the other hand, sometimes our general sense of anxiety about needing to get a lot of things done can make us feel as though the particular thing we’re focusing on–which sometimes isn’t nearly as crucial as it seems–absolutely requires our attention. Sometimes it does, but often this is a trap: if we’re always preoccupied with whatever we’re doing right then, we have no time to figure out whether we’re even doing the right thing.

So immediately if possible, or at worst some time soon when the opportunity presents itself, take a step back, breathe, and remind yourself that you’re only one person and, like it or not, will only get a certain number of things done that day. The priorities are to make the best use of your time and not to drive yourself crazy while doing it. Breathing and brief meditation exercises are sometimes helpful for taking a step back, as is simply getting into a quiet room and shutting the door for two minutes. Another good approach is to talk briefly to a friend who’s a good listener. Yet another, which is especially useful for people who like to be in action, is to briefly write out or type out the thoughts that are going through your head.

2. Write down what you need to get done
If you don’t write down the things you need to do, they may tend to chase each other around in your head, and worrying that you’ll forget one can be a source of additional anxiety. If you take a few minutes to list your tasks out, it’s true that it can be daunting because of having to face the whole list, but it’s also calming because it creates focus.

It’s helpful to write things down in a word processor instead of on paper because of the next step, but either way can work.

3. Get the unimportant things out of sight
There may be a lot of things on your list that would be nice to do, but that aren’t essential. It can help a great deal to move these off onto a secondary list. Depending on how much you have going on, you may never get to the secondary list, or by the time you get to it, it may be too late to do some of the items. This is OK! It’s far better to miss out on doing something unimportant than to fail to do something important because of being tied up with these secondary tasks.

If you keep the secondary tasks on the same list as the main tasks, though, they can add to feelings of distraction and anxiety. If you don’t need to do them now, get them out of your way, and remind yourself that they don’t need any of your attention right now.

There are some tips about prioritizing and feeling less distracted by secondary tasks in my post How to manage multiple priorities.

4. Pick the most important thing on the list and get started
This is just a little bit tricky, because we always need to balance importance with urgency. Importance is how much impact doing (or not doing) something will have, while urgency is how pressing it is to do it in the near future. More important things need to win out over things that are less important, but importance doesn’t always win out over urgency: that’s a judgement call.

One way to choose the task you should be doing at the moment is simply to ask “Which thing on this list will I be most happy to get done?”

And while it’s important to do a good job of picking the top task, it’s even more important to be willing to commit to doing the task you pick and not to let yourself be bamboozled by conflicting priorities into doing something unimportant.

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That’s the short version, but while there’s certainly more to say on the subject, the sequence of taking a step back, reminding yourself of what’s important, focusing on that, then taking action on the most important thing for the moment will rarely let you down.

Photo by Cape Cod Cyclist.

Not everyone has an elephant lurking in the downstairs closet, a brachiosaurus in the garage … but a lot of us do. And by this I of course don’t actually mean elephants or dinosaurs, but projects. Big projects. Big, ugly, scary projects that are disturbing to even think about because they’re so big and we haven’t even started on them (or have left them sitting around for much too long). It might be a major house repair that needs to be done so that the roof won’t start leaking, or a long overdue class assignment, or a book project that got tricky and has been sitting there on the hard drive, mocking you, for months now. Regardless of exactly what your beast is, there’s a simple, immediate way to take the first step toward vanquishing it. Unimpressively enough, it’s called “Do any little part of it … right now.”

Don’t take “right now” too literally: “right now” could be this weekend, or later today, or for two hours on Thursday. But don’t mess around with “right now” too much, either. As big as some projects are, there are very few that couldn’t benefit from a little attention very soon, even if it’s late at night and you’re tired and the project is unmentionably huge.

“Do any little part of it right now” may sound simple, and it is very easy to act on, but it has impact far beyond the effort required for it. Consider this joke:

Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.

It’s true. Humans are designed to eat things in bites, so the size of the what you’re eating doesn’t matter. To put it another way, you never, ever have to do a huge task: you only have to do small steps that over time add up to a huge task. That may sound like just playing with words, but it’s much more substantial than that: all large projects are accomplished through small steps, so the only way to do a large project is to do one small step. Then do another. Then another.

And honestly, the first small step breaks the whole thing wide open. Instead of having to say “I haven’t worked on my book in four months,” you can say “I worked on my book last night, even though it was only for 20 minutes.” Instead of saying “Someday I have to clean out that junk room,” you can say “I spent 45 minutes this morning gathering up all the spare linens I had in the junk room, and now the ones we need are in the linen closet and the rest are in the car, ready to go to the Salvation Army.” Zero small steps is a dead stop. One small step is being right in the midst of getting the job done.

Sometimes it may be hard to see what the small steps are, either because there’s so much to do that it’s all a huge tangle or because the big project consists of just doing one thing for a long, long time. In either case, there are ways to proceed. If you have no idea where to start, then the first step is figuring out what your next few steps are going to be. It’s organization, cataloging the problem. For instance, if your project is making a garden, make a list of things you need to do to be able to break ground: plan the size of the garden, choose what you’ll plant, look up the planting schedules, buy the seeds, etc. Making that list is itself the first step, and by the time you’re done, you’ll know what the second and third steps are already. If at any point you don’t know what to do next, that means that what you need to do next is figure out where you are in the project and what action needs to come next in the sequence.

And if the project is just a whole lot of one thing, then your steps are just pieces of that thing, of any size. Writers face this issue all the time, when the goal is to write a novel of, say, 100,000 words. While there might be (depending on the writer) a lot of preparatory work to do (or none at all), at a certain point the job is to sit down and churn out a lot of words. While you do that, you can count chapters, pages, words, hours at the keyboard, plot points completed, or anything else that gets you through the night, but if the project is daunting, figure out how much of some measure you need to do, then start doing that thing–and counting it.

Of course, after that first step there is always a second, and so on, and this discussion doesn’t delve much into the question of how to keep on track. On the other hand, keeping on track is much easier than getting on track in the first place, so if you have a big project you know you need to tackle, try starting in on any constructive piece of it, and if you don’t find yourself plowing ahead naturally, come back here for more ideas on how to keep the engine moving. After all, I’ve got a lot more I’ll need to post on this site over the course of years, and the only way for me to do it is one post at a time.

Elephant picture by Omar Junior.
Blank screen picture by Simon Scott.

I’m interested in connecting with more people who are interested in self-motivation and willpower, so I’ve begun to make a more concerted search on the Web for people who write personal blogs on subjects like organization, changing habits, weight loss, writing, difficult personal projects, better working habits, addiction, quitting smoking, exercise, improving personal relationship skills, and anything else where self-motivation or willpower play a big part, so that I can invite people to guest blog here and/or offer guest blog posts for their sites.

Any suggestions for me of people I should approach, blogs I should read, or places where a guest post from me (whether on a particular requested subject or not) would be welcome? One thing that I’d particularly love to be able to have here from time to time is posts from people who have achieved goals or made changes in habits, describing what they did, what challenges they faced, and how things went–but I’m also interested in many other kinds of posts.

You can contact me through the contact form on the right (just scroll down to find it) or by commenting here.

Here’s an issue Merrie Haskell, a writer, mentions in a comment to an earlier post: “I’ve noticed that I go through periodic surges of willpower. (I guess that’s what I mean.) I will be in a rut for months, and really feel stuck; then wake up one morning, and like a switch has been thrown, go into hyperdrive.”

Merrie’s hyperdrive clearly works for her: she’s sold well over a dozen short stories, including sales to two of the most demanding science fiction and fantasy markets, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. Clearly doing something well isn’t the same as feeling motivated to do it all the time. So what’s happening?

The short answer is that self-motivation–whether for writing or for any other project–is complex, and there are a number of factors that can influence it. The longer answer names some of those factors, and as we name them, we can begin to see that they influence each other, so that one advantage can turn into a lot of advantages, and one obstacle can turn into a lot of obstacles.

We won’t be able to look at all of the elements of motivation in this one post, or go into any in depth, but we can see some of the more prominent pieces and how they fit together.

Motivating ourselves has some basic requirements. For instance, we usually need to believe what we are trying to do will provide the result we want, to care about the result, and to believe we’re capable of achieving it. In addition to those basic requirements, there are some pieces that can really support and enhance self-motivation, like the support of others, feedback loops, and recognition. Lastly, to consciously pursue a goal, we need to take certain steps, like clarify what the goal is, gather the information we’ll need to make good choices, and figure out where the time will come from to achieve our goal.

If any of these pieces falters, the others can be disrupted, or at least slowed down. For instance, if I’m in the middle of writing a novel and lose faith that anyone will ever be interested in reading it, my enthusiasm is likely to crash. This is a crisis of believing that the goal will achieve its purpose, one of those prerequisites I mentioned.

What makes this worse is that even if I regain that confidence soon after, it has already had a chance to influence other elements. For instance, losing confidence that the novel will be read makes me stop writing, and when I can’t get up the enthusiasm to write, I could lose the belief that I can finish the thing at all. Losing these beliefs can cause me to stop feeling enthusiastic about the goal I picture myself achieving. I stop having writing to show to friends and downplay the importance of the project, which could cause the friends to decide I’m not interested in it any more and withdraw their support for it, which deprives me of the feedback I’d been getting that helped keep the project going. And so on.

So what do we do about these insidious slides? Tackle them one piece at a time. Fortunately, we have an advantage in getting back on track, which is that just as the failure of one element tends to lead to the failure of others, getting one element working encourages the others to work, too. For instance, seeking out someone who’s been enthusiastic about pieces of my novel that they’ve read so far can help rekindle my enthusiasm for the project and my belief that it’s worthwhile, at the same time that it brings in the support of others and provides me with feedback. Clarifying my goal for the book (say, a novel in a given genre of a given length, finished by a given date) and making a plan to meet that goal can get me writing regardless of whether I feel enthusiastic or not, which moves me closer to the goal, which tends to make me more enthusiastic.

This process may sound familiar: it has a lot in common with mood congruity, which I discuss in another post. In either case, the solution is the same: if you break out of the pattern you’re in to do one positive thing, you’ll be going in the right direction.

Takeaways:

• Strong self-motivation means a number of elements are working together to move the project forward.
• Problems with one element of self-motivation can cause problems with other elements.
• If you find yourself losing momentum on a project, find one motivating thing you can concentrate on and focus on doing that, regardless of whether you feel enthusiastic about it at the moment or not.

Photograph by V’ron

In recent posts I’ve talked about willpower, but there’s another kind of self-motivation a person might want to develop: the motivation to complete a particular project.

Willpower is the kind of thing you need if you want to quit smoking or resist making snarky remarks at staff meetings or to make the effort to memorize names when you meet new people. Project motivation is the kind of drive you need to finish a novel, learn a foreign language, or make major home renovations.

Many insights and techniques apply to both these kinds of self-motivation, but it’s worth knowing whether which habit or a project is more important to you at the moment so that you can focus on the approaches that will be most useful to for that particular goal. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention to change our behavior. If we try to do too much at once, it’s like trying to carry a bunch of bowling balls in our arms: one bowling ball is manageable, but trying to carry four or five is a disaster. Fortunately, once we master one kind of self-motivation, it’s often possible to move ahead and add others, one at a time, mastering each before we proceed (like carrying the bowling balls separately).

So what’s your biggest priority, right now, the one thing that self-motivation would help you the most with? If it’s a willpower issue, like losing weight or being a better listener, focus your efforts on being aware of your own mindset and recognizing opportunities for making good choices. If it’s a project, begin by choosing a very specific goal–for very big projects, perhaps a waypoint rather than the big end goal–and lay out the specific steps you’ll need to take. Then, figure out what changes you need to make to be able to take those steps–for instance, where the time to do them will come from.

Takeaway:

• Which strategies will help you most depends on whether you’re working on willpower or creating a push to complete a project.

Photo by Rick Kennedy