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What Motivates Your Writing?

We have lots of little terms for states of mind in the writing world: inspiration, muse, writer’s block… But when you strip all of that away, writers who keep writing have to have two important things:

• Love
• Motivation

Love and motivation may seem like the same thing. But they’re not.

The What and Why of Writing

Love is the why of writing — why do we write? Because we love something about it — the characters, the storyline, world building, stringing words together, language… or just that little something that we, even as word-smiths, just can’t define with words.  The foundation of writing is based on this love. But love alone cannot carry a writer from start to finish.

Motivation is the what of writing — what drives us to put one word after another on to the page? Love may be a part of the motivation, but it rarely is all of what motivates us. Because there will be days that writers, no matter how much they love their world or their characters or playing with words, just don’t feel like writing.

How can that be? If you love something, you should be thrilled to do it each and every day without fail. Right? Well… if this was a question that could be answered, I’m sure there would be a lot of ecstatic writers out there.

The truth is, writing is what happens even on the days when you just feel like spitting venom on the screen. And often, especially in a longer piece of writing, there will be cycles of ups and downs. There will be parts that are sooooo boring that it’s all you can do to just slog through them, struggling to get out of the quicksand to the much more exciting parts that dangle outside of reach.

How many times have you said, “If only I could just finish chapters 12 and 13… 14 will be so much fun to write!”

What gets us through that down time? Hard work. Lots of gritting teeth. Ignoring the delete key. And motivation.

Motivation and Goals

What motivates you to write through the tough times? Or do you suffer from lack of motivation that leaves your writing dwindling into terms such as “writer’s block?”

Motivation isn’t something that just happens. Motivation is a reaction to goals that we set for ourselves. Be it a page of text a day… a chapter a week… or a particular word count within a certain amount of time. Do you have a set writing goal of your own?

Goal-oriented writing is what challenges like NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) are all about. This takes place every November, world wide — a challenge to write 50,000 words (the equivalent of a short novel) in 30 days. It sounds pretty tough, but it’s really quite do-able if you break it down into smaller day-by-day bits.

For some people, the challenge of telling yourself that you will write 1,000 words in a day may be enough to keep motivation high. But if reaching wordcount goals isn’t enough for you, try giving yourself small rewards for achieving your word count. Tell yourself that if you can maintain X amount of words a day for a whole week, you’ll pamper yourself with something on the weekend. Whatever it takes to keep you reaching for that writing goal.

If you write consistently, you’ll discover that you’ll break through that wall of writing resistance. Then suddenly, that writing goal isn’t so hard to reach anymore. It becomes a part of your day. Your writing mind will begin to shake off the cobwebs and will be waiting to explore the page with you more willingly each time you sit down.

But there are hurdles you may have to overcome before you hit the high-riding periods of writing. And only true grit, goals and motivation will carry you through.

Keep writing!

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Posted by Aywren

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