It’s time to talk about motivation. Basically, I respond to both positive and negative motivation. Depending on the situation one works better than the other. For instance, I manage to get to work on time every day for the positive reason that I get paid to work and the negative reason that I don’t want to get in trouble. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but those are the core reasons.
When it comes to personal issues it is a different matter. Here’s some of the motivation techniques I’ve used to encourage myself to write over the years:
- Follow contest deadlines. This gives me a set deadline to work toward and, in theory, something concrete.
- Pay myself. I set up a payment plan where I gave myself a cash reward every 1,000 words with the total going toward tuition at a writing conference I wanted to attend. This worked great until I outsmarted myself and wrote words just to get the reward.
- Same as above, except with time instead of number of words
- Be accountable to another person, an informal “editor”. This worked too except it is an incredible drain on the other person and I can’t expect even the best of friends to do that long term.
All of these things work for a time, and then I run out of steam. So how do you make yourself do something consistently and over a long period of time? As an adult I make myself do things every day. I obviously have the ability, so why is it so hard to make myself do some of the things that are very important to me?
Time is part of the issue. I think that is a legitimate excuse in many cases. While I’m trying to write an hour every day, I’ve decided it would be far better to squeeze in what I can – even 15 minutes – than not to write at all. But I really feel I have that hour a day, somewhere within my day, to write.
How can I motivate myself? By remembering why I want to do this. I don’t want to be that person I hear in the lunchroom who talks about all the things they want to do, but never does them. I want to know I tried my best, and if nothing comes of it at least I did that much. I want to learn and grow and that only comes from doing – not from thinking about it. I can do this!
HourADayWriter 