My motivation thread...

If I'm not mistaken, there are other threads that broach the subject of motivation. Sorry, I can't think of what those threads are at this moment.

I'm a beginning writer and for me I spend alot of time reading and learning just reading the forums. I work on my actual writing very sporadically and with different purposes. I know many believe that editing should be something you do after the story is written. I'm finding that is helpful for me to use my first story as an educational experience. I'm about 40 pages into it but I continually go back and attempt to apply the things I read in the forum.

For me, who struggles with procrastination, writing in short spurts but consistently helps.

Welcome to the boards, Captain Morgan! Hope you manage to sit down and write something today.

Good luck Captain Morgan. When you come back as I expect you will pretty soon with the temptation of this thread to get you writing, let us know what genre you write in. This has nothing to do with motivation. It's just curiosity on my part. I like to know what and who I'm cheering on.

Nice to have you join us, Captain.

Many people here have great success with the BIC method: Butt in Chair. No TV or radio, no music capable of distracting you, no getting online just for a second, no gaming, no interruptions from other people in the household, no nothing but you and the blank page or screen. You sit in the chair and you write or do not write. Those are your only two options. You do it until either your goal (words or pages) has been reached or until a set amount of time has elapsed. Many people do BIC daily, others five days a week.

Now, you're going to find that writing is infinitely more interesting that just sitting there, so most days you write. (Well or poorly, doesn't matter.) In fact, some days you'll get all charged up and write way beyond your requirement.

Does this mean you get to subtract that time or those pages from the next day's BIC session. In a word, no. Every day you owe the same amount.

Find a time when your week is typical, and try BIC Monday through Friday. Even a short time like a half hour, if done faithfully every day, produces results.

And report back, okay?

Maryn, who'll get out the whip and chair next

Don't worry about size of chapters. End a chapter when it feels write. Adjust it later if the story demands, not the number of pages. Number of pages are more or less irrelevant.

Write everyday. Write something. If you keep at it, writing SOMETHING (it doesn't have to be good), eventually it will form a habit. It'll get easier. The important part is to stick with it.

Hang in there.

Actually if you want to employ a more useful metric to judge how you're doing, it's word count that most people use, since every publisher has their own idea about how many words should be crammed on a page, and then that varies from genre to genre.

So here's some word count figures to give you a feel:

-most paperbacks have between 250-350 words per page
-most mainstream novels are about 90,000 to 120,000 words long
-Stephen King says he writes about 1,500 words a day (that's what I aim for too)
-Hemmingway used to write 500 a day, and then whittle it down in the evening to 250.
-mainstream novels' chapters generally tend to be less than 3,000 words long.

There you go...should help give you an idea how you're doing progress-wise. I aim for each novel to be about 100k and tend to overshoot by 20%. But the cool thing I tell myself each day that I knock out 1,500 words, is that I've just completed another 1.5% of my novel.

That's a nice feeling, that.

Yeah, motivation is lacking a bit for me. I like your idea of not coming back until you've done some writing.

A while ago, I complained on Uncle Jim's thread about not writing. He told me to not come back until I'd written 250 words and funnily enough, I was back within 15 minutes.

I think it's just a matter of 'strapping it on' and doing it.

Well, 10 years ago you were looking for the same thing as now...so.....wouldn't you say that maybe after all these years, you need to find it within yourself? You did say that this thread was posted for yourself, but why not just use a sticky note on your wall? Does the public posting make it work better? If so, I expect to see chapters in my e-mail for editing/proofreading.

Motivation

For me, the only motivation that really matters is that writing is what I most want to be doing. I believe life is, at best, very short, and should be spent doing whatever it is that makes us the happiest. If watching TV is this thing, then watch TV. If sitting around drinking with friends is this thing, then sit around and drink with friends. If video games make you happy, then play video games.

If writing is the thing that makes your hours the happiest, then write.

There are a number of things I'd rather do than write, including something Reba, Shania, and my wife just won't agree to, but of all the things I can do that are actually possible, writing fills the bill. I like to write, I want to write, so I write. If I didn't like writing, if I didn't really want to sit down and write, I wouldn't write.

I spent too much of my life doing things that required motivation. At some point I decided to spend my life doing the things I wanted to be doing, rather than the things I did because they had to be done, or should be done, etc.

Coming so recently out of academia, deadlines motivate me. I'm working on developing a writing schedule for myself to keep me on track.

It also helps that whenever I work on new scenes, I discover something about the story, or the characters, or myself as a writer that drives me to keep at it.

We have several word count threads where we check in daily. There's the Pledge, the 500 a day (in mystery forum, but open for all), There's the weekend report in humour, I think SF/F has one today. There's a whole smorgusboard to choose from. Why not find one and plunge in.

And welcome aboard, Captain. Hope you brought refreshements.

My first "real life" experience in writing came when I was working for a local music magazine. It published twice a month and there was nothing like the fear of a deadline to get the pen moving. I actually worked quite well under pressure; the closer it was to the deadline, the easier it was to find the words to put down.

Once I stopped working for the magazine, and started doing fiction, the lack of anything to motivate me became a huge problem. I floundered for quite a few years until I joined a critique group. The consequences of not having pages ready are not quite as serious as they were at the paper, but having any sort of deadline that imposed by someone other than myself has upped my production quite a bit.

There's also a competition aspect to it. Although my group is quite low-key in this respect, there is certainly a little bit of unvoiced envy floating around when someone mentions an acceptance letter they received (or even a positive, personalized rejection). That kind of thing makes me anxious to get back to the keyboard.

Critique groups aren't for everyone, certainly, but for anyone who is struggling to find a way to stay motivated that hasn't tried one out yet, it probably couldn't hurt.

I was meant to join the Campbelltown branch of the NSW Writer's Centre at the start of the year, but haven't gotten around to it. Thanks chartreause, you've jogged my memory. I need to email them tonight some time.