Motivators

Like many writers, I have bouts of intense laziness. I enjoy writing a lot, but sometimes it's tough to plunk myself down in front of the keyboard when I could be outside, or reading, or playing games and watching TV.

For some people, the problem is writer's block, but it's easy to get distracted even when you know what you want to write. The majority of us have day jobs, and it's just not always a happy prospect to work 8+ hours, then come home and concentrate on writing.

I've found two things that help me self-motivate, and they both come down to making goals with deadlines.

First: graphing.
On the Critters.org site, there's an article on writing motivation (http://www.critters.org/writing-productivity.ht), and one of the things they suggest is to make goals and chart them. I graph the number of words of fiction I write every day. My default goal is 1000 daily. The chart is posted in my living room.

For some people, having the chart out where others can see it may be a big motivator. This mostly depends on how worried you are about what people think, and if you live with people who are willing to mercilessly mock you every time you miss a goal. Personally, I don't live with anyone who will call me out if they see a 0 words day on the graph. However, when I miss a day or two, I notice it much more now, and I have the desire to bring that line back up.

I also graph the number of critiques I do in a week, but that's a subject for a different post.

Second: NaNoWriMo
For those who aren't in the know, it stands for National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org). It started as a crazy idea among a few friends and blossomed into a non-profit organization and a sort of cultural movement.

It's exactly what it sounds like. You write a novel (the first draft anyway) in a month. For NaNoWriMo purposes, a novel is a single story 50k words or longer. The whole thing goes down every November.

There are a lot of great benefits to writing a novel in a month, especially for aspiring writers. Pros may not find the 1667 words per day too daunting, but it can certainly be a challenge when you don't write for a living.

Writing that much, that fast, teaches you to squelch your inner editor for that first draft. You may find your story carried in strange directions you didn't expect. Personally, I love this. I don't like to outline too heavily before the first draft so I can feel free to explore the paths that open up in the writing process.

It also gets you into a good rhythm. If you miss a day or two, it's tough to catch up. The time limit forces you to write on a daily basis. For people who only write one or two days a week (as I used to do), this can make a surprisingly big difference. With a deadline looming, you may find little times to write that you hadn't thought about before: your lunch break, the bus ride, after the kids go to bed. You may find that you have more time to write than you thought.

Besides the main event in November, there are several spin-offs.
National Novel Editing Month is March - Edit 50 hours. (http://www.nanoedmo.net)
Script Frenzy is in April - Write a 100 page screen/stage play. (http://www.scriptfrenzy.org). Another novel writing month is in July, in case November didn't work or you couldn't get enough. (http://www.julnowrimo.com)