Roundtable: What Motivates Us to Write?

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Today is National Tell Your Story Day, so we had a chat about strategies and self-motivators that help us tell our stories!

The contributors to the discussion are: Cedar, Nina Waters, H. Armstrong, jumblejen, Shea Sullivan, Mikki Madison, Sage Mooreland, Tris Lawrence, Lucy K.R., Shadaras, boneturtle, JD Rivers, Shannon, theirprofoundbond, Dei Walker, Merlin Grey, Sanne and an anonymous contributor.

Words We Motivate Ourselves With

Cedar: “You get to watch the number go up” and “Write for 5 minutes and then you get a treat.” Those are my main two lol. I treat my brain like a kid and reward it when it lets me write.

Nina Waters: “It’ll feel good once I start typing, so I just gotta start typing” and “It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be written.”

H. Armstrong: Some days writing is hard, and it’s okay. These are some of the phrases I tell myself when it’s one of those days:

“You just need to write a single word, nothing else”; “Writing down thoughts for this next scene or for future me to edit is also writing and helps the process.”; “It’s okay to take breaks, let brain recharge, make it an official Rest Day and try again another day.” And when things get real dire: “You will write again.”

jumblejen : That last bit is so important to remember! You will write again. “It’ll come ’round again,” is what I say to myself when I hit a particularly rough patch.

Shea Sullivan: Single word has changed my life. That was my rule for Nano one year (when everything was nuts and writing felt impossible) and I think I got 12k words.

Mikki Madison: I would tell myself constantly (during NaNo especially, RIP) “quantity, not quality,” as well as “any words are more words than you had at the beginning of the month.”

Sage Mooreland: “The only goal of the first draft is to exist. If it does that, it’s perfect by definition.”

Tris Lawrence: “While you’re writing it, no one needs to love this story but you. Have fun with it.”

Sage Mooreland: “Write by hand. Type it into notes. Speak it via talk to text. It doesn’t matter if it’s one sentence or it takes off into a whole thing. The point is to give yourself the outlet instead of holding it in.”; “No one but you ever has to see what you write. You don’t have to write for literally anyone else.”

Lucy K.R.: “You have to keep writing to write your next best story” gets me going sometimes! It’s easy to look at past successes and wonder how it happened, but the answer is always “you just typed it, you can do it again.”

Shadaras: “Just one sentence,” yeah, and also “It’ll be so fun to show this to my friends” (sometimes via the cheat code of “just narrate the gist of the story into discord chat while your friends leave emoji reacts and/or add their own thoughts, and decide later if you want to clean it up”)

boneturtle: i love this. i’ve also written my stories to my friends in discord first and cleaned them up after, it’s not only really fun but also a great way to get feedback in real time if something doesn’t make sense or doesn’t hit the way you expected.

Shadaras: Or to lean in to things which hit harder than expected!

JD Rivers: “I want to read the full story” plain and simple

Shannon: “It’s gonna bother me more if I don’t” happens a lot. kind of in the same vein as “I want to read the full story”, it’s going to keep nudging me until I just do it

jumblejen : “If you want this idea to stop haunting you, you have to actually write the story.” Also, “If you want to have stories to submit for publication you have to, you know, write them.”

theirprofoundbond: For general motivation, I tell myself, “You’re the only one who can write these exact stories.” On low wordcount days, I tell myself, “Hey, [low number] is better than 0!”

Dei Walker: “dare mighty things” (which I pulled out of Sandra Tayler’s Structuring Life to Support Creativity) – no one’s going to write this in this way except for me, and if I’m going to fail, I want to do it spectacularly. and if I don’t try, it’s not going to happen.

“fifteen minutes” – because usually I can get something started, and then build that momentum, if I give myself 15 minutes of focused writing time, not faffing-around-online time, not distracting myself or procrastinating. and if I can’t get going in 15 minutes, I have tried, and can come back and try again later.

“you can’t edit a blank page” – even if it’s awful, even if I hate it, I can’t fix it until it’s there. so I owe it to myself and my ideas to get those words out onto a page, and then I can make them better.

Merlin Grey: “You can’t edit a blank page” is a good one! I also tell myself “It can’t be good until it exists.”

Other Motivational Strategies

Sanne: Does external motivation count? I try to share ideas with friends, who can then hype me up, and then I can use that to motivate myself! “I’ve told my friend about this story idea and they want to read it, so let’s get it written so they can!”

boneturtle: i think external motivation definitely counts. these days i can only get words down if it’s for a submission deadline or a contract deadline; i want to write more, but it’s really hard to convince myself it’s a good use of time unless i have someone else counting on me.

Cedar: Another one that gets me is one of my partners shaking me by the shoulders saying “write it or i’m going to fight you.” Always good to have outside support

jumblejen : I’m of two minds. On the one hand, the urge to write is sometimes so strong that it isn’t so much a concern over motivation, it’s trying to hold onto that energy until I have the time/ability to write.

On the other hand, I have taken out some of the need for independent motivation by having a dedicated writing time. I work full-time at a non-writing job, so I don’t have a lot of time to write in my day-to-day. A friend hosts a weekly zoom for writing every Saturday morning and I’ve been joining them for about 5 years now. I show up and give it a good try, and more often than not, get some good words (or editing) in.

I also try to really listen to myself and ensure that if I truly need a break, I let myself have one so I don’t hit burnout.

Merlin Grey: Having a writing community definitely helps for me. With all of my ideas, it starts out as something burning inside of me that I have to get out and onto paper. Yet once I actually start writing my story, I often begin to question whether it’s actually any good—whether I’m executing my ideas well, or even whether the idea is worth writing in the first place. Having friends (online or IRL) to bounce ideas off of and get feedback from, or just generally cheer me on has been the most helpful thing for me. I was in a fandom writing server for a while (which sadly seems to be dying now), and last year I found an offline writing group in my area that I go to every other week to work on original fiction. Writing with other people—whether it’s in the writing group or running sprints online—helps me feel less alone in what I’m doing, and also helps me stay focused. I’ve also started using 4thewords, which is a game where you defeat monsters by writing a certain number of words in a certain amount of time. It’s been the most helpful specifically for pushing through doubt about whether my writing is any good and just getting words on paper. Because even if everything I’m writing is absolute garbage, I just need to get 500 more words down so I can defeat this last monster and get a cool hat for my avatar. Then later, I have a draft that I can come back to and work on polishing. (You can cut the 4thewords part from the social media post if it seems to much like an advertisement. But it honestly has been helpful in motivating me.)

(Also, the fiction writing group I go to is on Tuesday evenings, every other week. But there’s apparently a nonfiction writing workshop on Tuesday evenings at the same time on the alternate weeks. So people kept telling me “Oh, if this day and time is good for you then you should come to the nonfiction workshop too, on the other weeks,” and I kept thinking uh, nonfiction and fiction are very different; it seems strange to go to a workshop just because the timing is convenient, but I finally caved and tried it out. It was honestly a lot more fun than I expected! Our latest session focused on humor in creative nonfiction—and how that can take different forms in an essay versus a piece of travel writing—and it was really interesting. So I feel like that just speaks even more for the power of community in motivation, if it got me thinking about trying out a different type of writing.)

Anonymous: I have a few strategies when it comes to motivation.

If my motivation is flagging but I still love the story, I tend to need structural fixes: check the outline, rewrite it if necessary. If it feels like I’m hitting a wall outright, I’ll rubber duck to figure out why that is–usually it’s a plot or character issue from two chapters ago, and talking it through can help me locate and fix it so that I can get back to the writing.

On days when I end up blank staring at the document, I set a timer for however long, and tell myself that I have to write one word. Just one. Almost always, that one word ends up connected to a sentence that is connected to a paragraph, and I get a decent amount of writing done. On the rare days where my fingers are twitching towards the delete key because I feel like it’s all terrible, I close everything and walk away, because I know it’s not as bad as I think it is in the moment. Even if it was, that’s what editing is for. I just come back tomorrow, and try again.