Motivation points
Winkletter • 2 Apr 2022 •
This week I’ve been exploring the first boss I have to battle when creating and sustaining a regular writing habit: How do I get my butt in the chair? I came up with four answers.
- Train my attention
- Reduce impulsivity
- Increase my energy
- Reassess my commitments
The most important lesson I learned is that discipline is not a characteristic trait which some humans have and others don’t. Motivation is a state that I can build through simple everyday actions. Every action requires a withdrawal from the motivation bank, but some actions also deposit motivation points (MP) back into the bank. It costs me 2MP to take a walk, but I get 1MP back over the next three days. Do the same action often enough and the cost goes down while the payoff grows.
The problem comes when I build up a balance of MP and I expend it all on one big push to finish a project. I stop doing the little things that were paying into my account. I overdraw my funds.
My next set of questions are going to focus on the dread that sometimes accompanies writing. Once I’ve remembered my commitment to write I can get derailed by anxiety and overwhelm. How do I manage those negative feelings and spark creative joy?
Comments
@Winkletter I find your commitment to show up here to be pretty impressive already. Hope writing about your difficulties here will soon light the way forward on your novel-writing.
Side-note: This series of posts writing out loud to figure out how to get out of your slump is such great material for a longer Medium article. Have you considered stringing them together?
@therealbrandonwilson Ah yes. Last year my daily goal was to write anything. This year I’m working to write fiction and write on a schedule. I broke through the worst of my writer’s block, but now I’m trying to level up.
@jasonleow I’m hoping to iterate my way to a short book.
- Write here first to capture initial thoughts.
- Expand into a series of articles on Medium.
- Pull it all together into an ebook.
There are aspects I’ve discovered about writer’s block – particularly for fiction – that I have not seen anyone else discussing, like mental imagery and episodic memory. I may write about writer’s block for the rest of April.
@Winkletter Seems like you may like our buddy’s site Adagia.org created by Abraham Kim. Many of the folks there are practicing writing fiction.
@Winkletter agree about your unique takes on writer’s block. Also the ones about designing a reader’s experience. You got something there going for sure!
You mean writing fiction? It seems you have a pretty good streak going on LifeLog.