Creating Motivation

When motivation to write is in short supply, I recommend feeling grouchy about it. I suggest allowing authentic negativity to swell clearly into consciousness.

From personal experience, sample thoughts may include:

I would rather do something else. I am depressed about how this thing I might attempt may not be that great. Nothing about this writing task will ensure I lead a better life in the end. It’s possibly/certainly going to not be good enough. I don’t have anything to say. What I have to say doesn’t matter. I’m tired. Other people, the ones who are better at saying things, should do it while I lie here on the sofa and watch a video.

At this point, my barriers become clear—an invitation to look through and beyond them. A closer examination of my negativity usually reveals some kind of fear. Sometimes it’s boredom, though, or weariness with the nature of the task.

When I check myself in the midst of such a mood, thoroughly and honestly, and discover I do actually want to get a thing done, there is a way forward. I need to start with the problems.

The first challenge is finding the strength to smash the barrier between myself and my task. I have to give myself permission to act, to write, in whatever way I can, and to deal with the consequences later. (See my blog on feelings about making a mess.) My motivating thoughts don’t seem to be the glamorous phrases of inspirational posters, but they work for me:

I may as well write for x minutes. I believe in civil rights, and I have a right to my imperfect voice. Producing something is better than nothing because by itself work has dignity, and therefore I can respect my own efforts no matter what. To adjust Socrates a little bit, a life of being my own enemy is not worth living.

Once I reach the point of valuing my own predicament, I have the useful tool I need.

For example, my novel began with an idea that stalled. Wanting to tell the story of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë, I faced the deflating notion that two nineteenth-century white English author-ladies present a dusty, antique subject. They lived and wrote at a time with much stricter gender norms than we have. Some of their cautious ways, and certainly their racial privilege, seem as outdated as lace caps. Even though they had a moving friendship, nobody would care now.

Identifying that issue, however, helped me reframe my subject: People don’t know why they might care about the friendship between two white women authors who lived more than 150 years ago in England. I still had to answer why people might care, but I had shifted from seeing the problem as a wall to understanding it as a path.

So, I reasoned even though people don’t face exactly the same challenges today, they contend with similar ones. Then and now, social contexts restrict people by imposing hierarchical norms and categories, creating conflicts for them about what to hide or reveal about their “true” selves. For example, in addition to gender norms, different white Christian identities once presented a hierarchy to negotiate. I could lay those beside gender and racial hierarchies today. I wanted to express these different pressures to the extent of my ability while making common human emotions salient. Thinking comparatively gave me the idea for parallel and skew, non-identical stories of friendship, one in the past and one closer to the present, both evoking characters’ relationships to history and each other.

It motivated me to realize the form of my novel could be about perceiving connections across divides of difference. After all, it matters a lot whether we can overcome restrictive notions about whom we will identify with, whether in fiction or our real-world communities.

With a plan for the structure my novel, I found a place to start and the drive to see how far I could get. Of course, fresh problems require repetitions of this process, but this work leads to growth and greater confidence.

Having a reliable method for approaching challenges matters because the moments of already having the answers or skills are temporary. Accept that, and the motivation to learn to stick with writing, or to live to the utmost of one’s ability, may follow.