do you ever just lack motivation?

my current story needs less than an hour's work to complete and i already have the next story ready to be written. for the last 3 days, i can't force myself to sit in front of the keyboard and do the work. i tell myself that taking a break is important to recharge the batteries. am i full of it?

somebody motivate me!

I occasionally have a twelve-minute bout of that. Usually when my wine glass is empty.

Do I ever lack motivation?

Yes, haven't been able to do more than come up with a basic idea for months.

This is where setting up a specific writing time and sticking to it comes in handy.

Find yourself a less pleasant task that needs to be done. It's a lot easier to waste time writing when the garage needs to be cleaned out, or your insurance policy needs to be reviewed.

I think the key is not to be dependent on motivation. Schedule a time in the day to force yourself to write -- even if for only 15 to 30 minutes -- and forget about motivation. Make it happen no matter how much you dislike what you are writing. Chances are, you will make progress this way.

I sympathize, because my motivation level swings wildly, and sometimes it's very hard to kick-start it.

I was going to give a lengthy and helpful reply, but I just couldn’t motivate myself.

Gotta fight through it. Writing shouldn’t be the hardest thing you do.

For writing? Never.

For boring stuff like updating my signature ? Always.

I write purely for fun, so I’m not going to force myself to sit down and write if I’m not feeling it; That’s a good way to kill my interest in writing.

JugheadJane said:

I write purely for fun, so I’m not going to force myself to sit down and write if I’m not feeling it; That’s a good way to kill my interest in writing.

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this is how i am. 99% of the time, i'm amusing myself. i'm afraid if i force myself, it will become a chore.

rae121452 said:

this is how i am. 99% of the time, i'm amusing myself. i'm afraid if i force myself, it will become a chore.

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I'm not writing just to amuse myself, but no-one's paying me to write either. I try to write every day, but things get in the way. I rarely lack motivation to write, but sometimes I lack motivation to write erotica, and sometimes I lack motivation to rewrite stuff that I know has to be changed.

For me the motivation can return after a little pause, or a change of pace, or a new idea will change my attitude.

My burst of writing filled a window in space-time when certain unpleasant elements of life aligned to allow the voices in my head to run wild. That alignment will not recur. (My partner was distracted by tragedy and I had too much free time.) I'm trying to re-align life so I have time and space for the inspirations to ferment and flow.

Or I'm just lazy.

Correction: I must concentrate to write. My recent medical issues precluded deep concentration; indeed, lowered my blood oxygenation and thus brain function. I'm dumb enough to opine on politics; that doesn't require much brainpower. But creating stories is tough. My voices are muzzled. Alas.

I think that I have been lucky. For most of the past 50 or so years, writing has been my job. There have always been deadlines. Sometimes they have been a few hours away; sometimes a few days away; sometimes a few months away. But they have always been there. I have always known when I got up in the morning that it was time to write. Or time to do something closely allied to writing - researching, for example. Not feeling motivated? Tough. The clock is ticking. Just make yourself a cup of coffee (or pour a glass of wine) and get on with it.

Hypoxia said:

My recent medical issues precluded deep concentration; indeed, lowered my blood oxygenation and thus brain function. I'm dumb enough to opine on politics; that doesn't require much brainpower.

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For this, today, you win the internets.

I'm sorry for your medical issues, I hope you're better soon. I don't like politics, but you write well.

CeasarBoobage said:

For this, today, you win the internets.

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That's at least the second win. Some decades back, when the WWWeb was new and usenet still ruled, I was named a Hero of the Internet due to my temperate writing. Like, instead of telling fuckheads to fuck off, I invited them to take a stroll into Kilauea. Nice, ain't I?

I'm sorry for your medical issues, I hope you're better soon. I don't like politics, but you write well.

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Thanks and thanks. Recovery will be slow and more stuff keeps popping up. I'll see new -ologists soon. Bother.

I don't think it's lack of motivation on my part, more like confusion. I've had the idea for a story for some time now but couldn't decide which way I should go with it. This would be my first real story as the other three were short little entries to see if I could ever put words and ideas in print. Of course I would like to write something that's has broad appeal, there are a few categories that I'm not interested in reading or writing.

Hypoxia said:

Correction: I must concentrate to write. My recent medical issues precluded deep concentration; indeed, lowered my blood oxygenation and thus brain function. I'm dumb enough to opine on politics; that doesn't require much brainpower. But creating stories is tough. My voices are muzzled. Alas.

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I can relate.

Hypoxia, I hope you recover soon.

I used to be able to write stories fast and well. I could easily do a short story in an hour or two, and a full-length novel (first draft) rarely took me more than 4-6 weeks. I was on here under a different name a decade or so ago, came in third in one Survivor contest, and found my first publisher here.

Then, several years later, a trauma happened, and for a while I couldn't write anything with sexual content without having panic attacks.

My writing career--I was multipublished--started to tank, because I wasn't writing any more of the stuff that had actually been earning me money (erotic romance) and because I'd never been good at promoting my own work, and more people were getting published or were self-publishing, so my sales went downhill. When the erotic romance side of my career went down the tubes, my young adult fiction side started suffering as well. Soon I could barely write *anything*. The quality of my writing started to deteriorate because my heart wasn't in it.

My health took a nosedive, and between fibromyalgia and migraines causing "brain fog," and depression and anxiety telling me I'm shit and can only write shit, I lost the ability and willingness to try to write much of anything. At this point, it's been a bit over two years since my last publication under my erotic romance name, and nearly a year since my last young adult novel was published. I have nothing under contract or consideration, and nothing in progress that would be worth sending to a publisher.

I wrote a few things here and there, and under the name I have here now, I've posted seven or eight stories since I started this account. I've completed a full-length novel, but had to keep stopping and starting again, so the first draft took me a year and a half rather than my previous month and a half. (It's decent, but I'm not aware of any publishers that would take it because it's a genre hodge-podge, so if it sees the light of day it will be self-published.) But I've also spent the last three or four months sitting here staring at my computer thinking, "I've lost my words, I've lost my voice, I've lost my stories."

The advice of setting a time each day and sitting down to write at that time no matter what is good advice for the majority, I think. For me, it hasn't worked, because I sit down to write and my brain goes completely blank. I can write posts on forums or Facebook, and occasional journal entries, but not fiction. In the past three years or so, I've gone from having so many ideas I couldn't keep track of them all, to having almost no ideas whatsoever. (Though in March I set myself a challenge someone on here suggested to someone else: coming up with one story plot idea per day. I met the challenge, but have only written one of those stories, because my brain isn't letting me put the meat on the bones of the others. And the one I wrote is pretty crappy; it's currently my lowest-rated story on here.)

So writing for me has become a vicious circle of lacking the ideas and words, leading to writing less skillfully than I used to so I can actually complete things, leading to not being motivated because my writing currently mostly sucks. (Didn't help that from mid-January until a week or so ago, I went through the longest and deepest bout of depression I've had in my entire life. I'm out of that now, so I'm hoping the writing will start coming back...)

The best for you, KCW.

My trauma is not so dramatic as I'm not precluded from making money at anything, merely depleting our savings (good thing we saved!) and feeling like a fraction of a person. More medical issues await me. If I can get my sleep cycle normalized, I might be able to write fiction again. Then I'll mostly disappear from the forums. If y'all see me here, I'm being useless.

rae121452 said:

my current story needs less than an hour's work to complete and i already have the next story ready to be written. for the last 3 days, i can't force myself to sit in front of the keyboard and do the work. i tell myself that taking a break is important to recharge the batteries. am i full of it?

somebody motivate me!

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No worries. It happens to the best of us.

This one time in high school......<<<<<There's your motivation. Think of something from your school days that would have motivated you against your will. Be a rebel against yourself.

It happens to me in stretches. I think it's mostly that I don't want to be repetitive. I get started on too many stories that feature a certain type or size of woman or man and I don't want them to be too similar so I get stuck trying to think of ways to differentiate between them.

As a psychologist I define MOTIVATION different. I took a course on the subject. Motivation aint ENTHUSIAM or APPETITE, its the purpose an organ serves. Penis motivation is urination and sex.

FEELINGLUCKYPUNK said:

As a psychologist I define MOTIVATION different. I took a course on the subject. Motivation aint ENTHUSIAM or APPETITE, its the purpose an organ serves. Penis motivation is urination and sex.

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Motivation can be conceived of as a cycle in which thoughts influence behaviors, behaviors drive performance, performance affects thoughts, and the cycle begins again. Each stage of the cycle is composed of many dimensions including attitudes, beliefs, intentions, effort, and withdrawal which can all affect the motivation that an individual experiences. Most psychological theories hold that motivation exists purely within the individual, but socio-cultural theories express motivation as an outcome of participation in actions and activities within the cultural context of social groups.

Maybe you need to retake that course in modern times, Jimbo.

Lazy

Sometimes I have a story almost done and I get lazy about it. The word doc is up on the computer but I'm doing everything to avoid it. it's almost like homework towards the end of the story. I feel like I don't have strong endings and finishes to most of my work and I dawdle because I can't get the words out.

It happens but it's more laziness or fear of self-rejection. I can write 2,000 words quickly but the last few sentences take foooooreeeeeveeeeerr.

TxRad said:

Motivation can be conceived of as a cycle in which thoughts influence behaviors, behaviors drive performance, performance affects thoughts, and the cycle begins again. Each stage of the cycle is composed of many dimensions including attitudes, beliefs, intentions, effort, and withdrawal which can all affect the motivation that an individual experiences. Most psychological theories hold that motivation exists purely within the individual, but socio-cultural theories express motivation as an outcome of participation in actions and activities within the cultural context of social groups.

Maybe you need to retake that course in modern times, Jimbo.

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When I started gay was a mental disorder and m\oms made their boys schizophrenic. People were neurotic back then, not today.