External deadlines really help with motivation. See if you can find a hobby group or writing-related Discord or something like that, something where people create goals for everyone to work toward and keep each other accountable. Like, we’re all sharing a short story by August 17th, or we’re all going to bring something new we’ve written to our next meeting.
As for starting, I feel like I had a ton of different starts as a kid. There were school projects, things I tried with friends, and lots of instances of me trying to make my own versions of things I liked, some of which were written artifacts. I guess I always started with whatever I wanted to write, whether that was a small project or a small part of a large one.
I think you shouldn’t worry about whether your writing project is the right thing to start with. Someone might tell you to start with flash fiction instead of a novel, but that’s no good if you don’t enjoy flash fiction, and flash fiction has its own challenges that might pose more difficulty than writing a scene of a novel. It’s OK if your writing is crap (it probably will be for a long time). It’s OK if it takes forever to get words out. It’s OK if you get stuck. Just write something.
I used to write tens of thousands of words weekly in story for role playing games: Have something you want to write: get a pen get a notebook, I like a4 size (foolscap for Americans is near enough the same). Start writing at the bit you want to start at, you can do the beginning later.
Practice, it gets easier the more you do it.
Now most of my writing is for IT system functional specifications, and in those sort of technical documents just follow the style, they’re too narrowly designed to be difficult
If you can’t stay motivated writing for other people, perhaps writing isn’t the best career for you. I never learnt any tricks, motivation came from enjoying the process, enjoying putting ink on paper; at work enjoying producing a design that will work and that is clear to the people who will build the system
I write music, but I feel like a lot of the creative principles are the same…
First, keep your creative muscle in shape by exercising it daily. Write something. Even if it’s garbage. Keep a little library of ideas for future projects. Little efforts each day add up over time.
Second, don’t try to be creative in a vacuum. Read books, poems, short stories, from just about anyone. Let their style and their approach to language kickstart your own ideas.
I used to write technical stuff, like research reports, professionally. I have a few funny ideas or concepts that I feel I could do justice, and found that once I had some time, cranking out an outline and just adding flesh to the skeleton was sort of fun.
This is the way. Write a basic bullet points or headings only. Write a very basic skeleton. Then just start writing the body. Write any shit that comes to your mind. Don’t worry too much about it not being perfect, or about formatting or anything. Get a rough draft started. The important part is to just start writing something. If you can’t think or something good to write, then write some approximate shit and highlight it to know to come back later. Absolute shit on a page is much better than paralysis and procrastination.
Novice blogger here.
I usually write when my head becomes filled with too many thoughts and I need an outlet to dump all of them. It comes in ebb and flow.
This must be from around 1980.
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/humor/fionavar/flame_school
I wrote a couple of novels, never got published though
For me, the big thing was participating in National Novel Writing Month. If you’re not familiar, NaNoWriMo takes place in November, and it’s a community where people get together to try writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It’s become pretty commercial now, but the key thing that seemed to keep people going was community and routine.
If you don’t take any days off, that’s 1667 words every day. That came out to about three pages in my word processor, and I thought three pages was pretty doable. The routine helped get over some writer’s block I’d been struggling with, and it’s something that has been repeated often as advice from famous authors.
Taking a day off made it a lot harder the next day. Not just for making up the word count, because I’d take a day off only if I was ahead of quota. But when your momentum comes to a rest it becomes a lot harder to kick off the motivation. So the trick if you want to do it is to do it, but then you gotta do it or you won’t do it.
Another thing to keep in mind - your writing doesn’t have to be good. In fact, it’s pretty encouraged to spit out garbage if it keeps you writing because you can edit it later. If you edit as you go and try to skip the drafting process, it’s like trying to do two things at once - both things suffer for it. In retrospect, editing was probably the more challenging part of writing.
That is basically how I wrote my bachelor’s thesis right before the deadline: just sit down and write write write, then start the next day by editing the text from the previous day and again write write write. You do need to have an inkling of what you want to say, but otherwise it’s a great way to keep going.
Edit: also, there are plenty of famous fiction writers who don’t draft a book, but just start with an idea and see where it takes them. Obviously, this doesn’t work for everyone or every book, but it’s a valid way of working.
Oh yeah, I should have been more clear: editing as you go is a totally valid way to do it. It’s generally how I prefer to write (why write it twice if I can write it once?), but some people can really struggle with it.
Whether it’s in the moment or retrospectively, any professional work probably should be edited. I have found that editing in the moment or even yesterday’s work causes me to miss things. There’s certainly something to be had by letting things percolate and then reviewing with fresh eyes.
Starting was always the hardest part for me. Editing yesterday’s work was a good way to get over writer’s block. Another trick I liked was when I finished for a session it was sometimes helpful to end in the middle of a sentence. Starting from nothing is hard, but even just finishing an incomplete thought can get the ball rolling.
Good points!
Also, don’t worry too much about the writing itself, about whether it’s good in a technical sense. There are plenty of successful authors who aren’t great writers, but they are great storytellers, and that’s the most important part.
What started me: Self expression.
What keeps me going: Even more self expression in a world drowning in slop. If I have an idea, I bring it to paper in the way I want, with the words I like, in a manner that I see fit. It is a craft that fills me with pride!
I followed a language course and had to hand in a text every week. Everyone else would write matter of fact stuff while I would verge wildly off topic with stories. The teacher told me she enjoyed them and that I should continue after the course is finished, so I write short stories now.
I started in school and was lucky enough to have teachers who encouraged me to keep writing. The motivation has always been to entertain; to make people laugh with short stories, comics, scripts, whatever. That carried through to my work at university, and I spent a lot of my free time making goofy adventure games and entering game jams.
These days I still have the same core motivation of wanting to entertain, but I guess with the deeper idea of wanting to positively impact the world by giving people memorable experiences. But as any writer will tell you, those noble aspirations will only carry you so far. On the days where I’m less inspired, the motivation is getting paid ;)
inoticed at some point that i dont have the endurance for long stories so when i write i try to get to 300-600 words.
Also i started writing incoherent bs because thats easy and can reference things i see like:
The sirup bottle fell.
It landed hard on the ground and left a puddle looking like blood. Ants swarmed around, some drowned in their greed.
A smarter worker ant started making a regulatory system to protect workers called the Ant Industrial Norm (AIN).
And then less ants died.Happy end
I started to escape reality.
Now that ai scrapes everything I’m not motivated to create at all.
Because I wanted to create something. Tell the stories going on in my head. If for nothing else because I could.
Nowadays, although it has become harder to steal that time for myself, it’s because I want to write what I like to read. And maybe, just maybe, one day my work will find other eyes to be read and enjoyed.
It’s also a legacy. A testimony. Something that states “I was here, I made this.”
