How To Drum Up Motivation When You Don’t Feel Like Writing

Ever get an interesting assignment, land some great interviews, and then struggle for motivation when it’s time to start writing?

A freelancer friend of mine was having a crisis of this sort recently and talked about it in one of the writers forums I belong to. There were a lot of people who empathized. Because I think most of us have been there at one time or another. And you have to remind yourself that it’s normal and it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer.

Keyboard Motivation - Image: Flickr

But it’s certainly frustrating when it happens because if you’re a freelancer, you have to write and complete assignments in order to get paid. So in order to get things moving again, it’s helpful to take a step back and think about what might be causing the lack of motivation.

Here are some questions to ask:

1) Are you lacking motivation because you’re overwhelmed by all your notes or by the assignment itself? If so, you can chip away at a big story by breaking it down into smaller tasks. If you have the luxury of time, you can estimate how long the story will take you to write and then simply break up the assignment into manageable chunks of time over a couple days. I also strongly suggest using the Power of 15—particularly to work your way through writer’s block. Sometimes I simply read through my notes the night before I have to write a story. This works for me. Even while my brain is sleeping, it seems to absorb information on a deeper level so that I’m able able to write with greater ease and fluidity when I get up the next morning.

2) Are you afraid of making a mistake? I talked about the difference between the writer’s brain and the editor’s brain last week. Freelancers who seem to have a brain that’s wired more for editing than writing often have a tougher time tuning out the hypercritical internal committee. You know when you’ve fallen victim to the editor brain. Every time you write five words, you end up deleting four—because your internal editor is telling you that everything has to come out perfectly the moment your words hit the page. Then, your progress slows like snails crawling in molasses. Once again, using the Power of 15 is helpful when you’re trying to get past this hangup. If you try to write as much as you can against the clock, and you tell yourself that you have to hit a certain word count by the time an alarm goes off, your editor brain won’t have time to ramp up its hypercritical self. It’s the same concept as NaNoWriMo, only on a smaller scale. But it does work. And when you’re trying to get words down on a page, temporarily quieting the editor brain is a good thing. Then once the words are down on the page, the editor brain can take over again, nipping and tucking all it wants to.

3) Do you need a break? With the economy the way it is, I’d be willing to bet that any writers with workaholic tendencies probably have gone into hyperwork mode. It’s hard not to because you have to work harder and longer to find freelance assignments these days. But if you’re working too many hours and you’re not giving yourself any downtime, you’ll eventually pay the price. You’ll either get too brain tired and too burned-out to work, or you’ll wear yourself so far down that you’ll get sick. And then you’ll be forced to slow down. I’ve done the latter in the past, and it’s not fun. Working to the point of exhaustion and not taking care of basics like proper sleep, diet, and exercise will eventually catch up to you and erode your motivation over time. You are a human being, not a human doing. So it’s better to choose downtime than to be forced into it. Besides, if you’re overtired, the quality of your work will suffer and you won’t have the energy to market yourself or bring in more work. And that will ultimately kill your business.

4) Are you bored with the topic you’re writing about? This is a toughie. And I’d also be willing to bet that every freelancer has dealt with this problem at least once. The bad news is, if you’re bored writing it, the reader will probably be bored reading it. So find something—anything—interesting about the topic and expand on that. I remember when I was still a news reporter and had to cover things like planning commission meetings and sewer system stories. But if I could find the human element in the story, I always got more interested in the story. I remember once when I was covering a story about a neighborhood that continued to flood over and over again. It was a dry story until I went out into the neighborhood with a photographer and we saw how people had to live as a result of a problem that the city never seemed to adequately fix. Seeing the buckled floors and smelling the mold and mildew made the story real. So if you’re bored with a story topic, you probably haven’t done enough digging or you’ve left the human element out of the story.

So what about you? Ever have motivation problems when it comes to writing? How do you move yourself beyond the problem and into the solution? Drop me a line and tell me about it!

Photo credit: Martin Kingsley (Flickr)