How Keep Writing, Even When You Don’t Feel Like it
“You’ll go broke waiting for the muse to fly down and sit on your shoulder.”
If you’re trying to make a living off of writing, even if you’ve found your niche, and platform, you’re still going to be facing a lot of fierce competition, and the only way to keep up with that is if you’re willing to have to produce a ridiculous amount of writing. That means that you’re going to have to write, whether or not you actually want to.
However, for most creative types, the cruel fact of life is that the urge to create is not always there. The difficulty becomes then, “how do I write when I don’t want to?” The answer primarily lies in a variety of strategies that you can use to ensure that you can keep writing, even when the motivation doesn’t miraculously appear.
Write on a Schedule
Write at the same time every day! It might be the most common advice to aspiring writers.If you plan to write, create a plan for maintaining your writing schedule. It’s best that you write at the same time, for the same amount of time, and keep it consistent. If you do this, writing will become less of an endeavor, and more of a habit — one you’re far less-likely to worry about when you’re just not in the mood to write.
This might be difficult, depending on your schedule, of if you work a job that works inconsistent hours. If that’s the case, setting aside a certain amount of time each day (I recommend at minimum 30 minutes) can just serve just as well — provided you maintain the discipline to do it.
Using that exclusively for writing will help you develop and grow tremendously as a writer, and as a writing professional! If someone asks what you’re doing during that time, tell them the truth: you are working.
Set Realistic Goals
Hand-in-hand with the above section, having a set amount of words that you’re aiming for each day is incredibly valuable. It’s one of the most-effective means of ensuring that you’ll consistently produce writing, even if you don’t want to.
This number does not have to be enormous, though. This goal needs to be something that you’d be comfortable with doing every single day. If that’s a only 250 words every day, that’s fine. If you’re someone that can write 4,000 words a day, go for it. Just make sure that you’re doing roughly the same amount every day, and you don’t let it slip.
It’s always a better idea to doing things in smaller, more-manageable chunks, and writing is no exception. Writing a 60,000 word novel may seem like a daunting, impossible task. Writing a mere 500 words every day seems totally manageable. However, if you do the latter, you’ll have hit that “impossible” amount in a mere 4 months — rather quickly for a novel-writing time!
Eye on The Prize: Spend Less Time Doing Non-writing Activities
You’ve spent the entire day interacting with publishing twitter. Later, you’ve looked up a few different publishers, and read a few different parts of books in your genre. You may have gone over a few notes, or did some research. You’ve spent the entire day working; all of these tasks are important for a writer. Note, however, that none of them are writing.
You can work yourself silly doing all the things that surround writing, without actually going through the process of writing itself. This is a particular issue of those who self-publish, having to handle all of the business and marketing themselves.
If you’re struggling to produce new content, perhaps this is your issue. Spend less time talking about your manuscript, and more time actually working on it. Don’t spend as much promoting your articles as you do actually writing them.
You can be the best marketer in the world, but nobody can read something that doesn’t exist. The key to keep writing: keep writing.
Join a Sprint Group
Sprints are the best way to produce more writing, quickly. They’re among the best ways to simply focus, and write. Simply set a time limit (usually a short amount of time, 20–50 minutes)put on some music if you’d like, and focus on nothing but writing.
That is nothing but writing. It should just be you, and your words for the full duration of the sprint. No distractions, no social media, nothing. “What if I need to look something up?” you might ask. Put a note in it, and look it up later. If you focus just on getting words to page, you’ll be surprised how much your word output increases.
Groups are extremely useful for this as well. If you’re someone that struggles with keeping up on your projects without a degree of accountability (I’m one of these), you might benefit from a sprinting group. There’s a certain competitive element to it at times, but the extra step of having accountability if you don’t manage to write anything is usually enough to maintain some degree of motivation.
Maintain Simultaneous Projects
I find that whenever I’m struggling to get anything finished on a project, I might need some time away from it. However, that isn’t great for writing every day.
As such, if I don’t find the inspiration I’m looking for in project A of today, I’ll gladly move onto project B. Then C. If I get to the point where even project D isn’t inspiring me, I’ll make a snack or take a walk — the problem is clearly me in that situation.
I have a massive work-in-progress folder, with half-finished projects. I’m not ashamed of any of them — they WILL be finished eventually. That’s not me encouraging you to build a massive WIP folder full of abandoned projects, however. This only works should you decide to keep up with all of them.
Don’t Try to Force Words
If you’re not writing, you’re not writing. There’s nothing to be gained from plopping yourself in front of a computer screen for six hours, writing absolutely nothing, and torturing yourself for hours on end.
Instead, do something to recharge. I know it’s cliche, but take a walk, do some physical activity, and remember to actually eat something every now and again. Make yourself something to drink. Go through your list self-care actives. If you simply fall behind in taking care of yourself, your mood is going to reflect that. Poor self-care = low motivation = suffering writing output.
If you’re stressed out, or you’ve recently had an argument, this is not the ideal time to write. It’s vital for all writers to practice some sort of mental relief techniques. Whether that’s mindfulness exercises, meditation, yoga, or whatever clears your head, you’ll find writing infinitely easier afterwards.
Recognize When a Project Isn’t Working
Every time you sit down to write, you just hate your project. You don’t want to work on it. You’ve been in the biggest slump for the longest time, and you just cannot be bothered to work on it. You just simply have zero motivation.
At this point, if possible, I think it’s time for an intervention. Why do you not want to work on your project? Take a step back, take a look at it, and try to take a look at your project as an outsider. It might be something that you best end up abandoning.
You can work on a project you don’t like when you want to write. You can work on a project you like when you don’t want to write. Writing on a project you don’t care about when you don’t want to write is nearly impossible. If you’re prone to frequent slumps, this project is going to be on the backburner for a long time, and it might be a good idea to simply move onto something else.
Perhaps you’ll find more inspiration elsewhere.
