How to Find the Motivation to Write Your Book by Alyssa Hitaka

Writing is hard. It’s thrilling, invigorating, and rewarding, sure—it’s definitely worth doing—but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy. Once you’ve come up with a great idea you’re excited about, it can be difficult to put pen to paper and bring your lovingly crafted story to life. Today, we’re presenting a few key tips that can help you find the motivation to write when you’re feeling lackluster.

Remember Your Why

Why do you love your story? Why does it deserve to be told? Why do you want to write? Why are you putting yourself through all this? Amid all the toil of writing, it can be easy to forget why you’re doing it in the first place. So if you find yourself succumbing to the allure of procrastination, take a moment to remember why you embarked on this journey in the first place. Rediscovering your motivation can give you renewed energy to tell your story.

Break Down Your To-Do List

Writing a novel takes a lot of effort. It’s not something you’re going to finish in an afternoon. When you think about everything that must go into your story, it can easily become overwhelming. That’s why it’s best not to think about it that way.
Any task—even the biggest, most intimidating projects you might undertake—can be broken into numerous smaller tasks. You might not be able to finish a chapter today, but you can finish a page. If you’re overwhelmed by the tasks at hand, keep breaking them down until they’re doable, and work from that level. And it’s okay if you have to break your tasks down to a very basic level. Any progress is progress, and it’ll build up over time—so it doesn’t matter how little it is on a daily basis.

Plan Carefully Before Diving In

There are probably certain sections and scenes in your story that you can’t wait to just dive into and start writing. But this impulsive style isn’t usually the best way to tell your story. A novel requires require a well-developed plot with relatable characters and realistic turns of events, and until you carefully flesh out an intensive outline of your plot, even you don’t know all the finer details of your story.
So, before starting to breathe life into your characters, take the time to develop a careful outline of your story. Covering all the major (and even minor) plot developments allows you to view the flow of your story from a distance and make necessary tweaks before you start writing. It also gives you an opportunity to think deeply about each major section of your story, which can help you identify plot holes and other insufficiencies that would be much more difficult to rectify after you’ve already written your manuscript. Once you have a well-thought-out plot outline to guide you, you’ll have much more confidence when you start writing, boosting your motivation.

Abandon Perfectionism

One of the factors that frequently keeps writers away from the keyboard is the fear that their story will be less than perfect. Well, of course your story won’t be perfect—that’s impossible. Even the most beloved, world-famous authors can’t pull that off. Abandon the idea of perfectionism by reminding yourself that your story deserves to be told, even if not “perfectly.”
When writing your first draft, you don’t need to be concerned with “perfection” at all. At this stage, all you should be focused on is converting your story into words on the page. It can be clunky and full of grammatical mistakes. That’s fine, because this isn’t what you’re publishing. Reminding yourself that you’ll revise your story through various drafts frees you from the paralysis of “perfection” and allows you to move forward with your writing.

Reframe Your Fears

Sometimes you may put off writing under the fear that you won’t be able to do justice to your beloved storyline, failing the characters you now love so much. We’re not going to pretend that that thought isn’t scary. But you know what’s even scarier? Never writing your story at all.
If you’re feeling unmotivated, spare a thought for your future self. Think about how accomplished you’ll feel having written your book, how rewarding it will feel to know people are reading and loving your story, and how you might build up a fanbase for future stories. Sure, that’s motivating. But what’s even more important to think about is an alternate future where you didn’t write your book. Think about the regret you’ll feel, the potential you knowingly wasted. The way to save yourself is to write your book. There may be no motivation stronger than that.

Get Help

You don’t need to be alone on this journey. Whether it’s friends who can encourage you, beta readers who can offer valuable feedback, editors who can polish your manuscript, or professionals who can help compose a killer query letter to pitch your manuscript to agents, the world is full of people who can aid you in your novel-writing mission. We at QueryLetter.com are passionate about great books and helping the authors behind the titles. As agents, publishers, and authors ourselves, we’re in the ideal position to guide and encourage up-and-coming authors.

- Alyssa Hitaka, QueryLetter.com

M - How to Revive your Motivation

Dedication, perspiration, and focus are needed to take on a writing career. For this reason motivation can take a dive at those times when we’re feeling less inspired, less hopeful, or just too darned tired. So how do we get that motivation back? The best place I’ve found motivation is through the support of other people. It takes a team to write and publish a book, even for self-publishers.

The Team:
Your cheer squad. This group of people can be found at home or close by through family and friends. It’s made up of people who believe in you, even if they don’t fully understand what it is you do.

Your critique group. These supporters do understand what you do. It’s their job to not only look for places where you could improve your work, but also for the places where your work shines. A good critique partner is a great motivation generator.

Your writerly friends. These people will ride the highs and lows with you. They are the shoulders to cry on when you’re suffering, the champagne glasses to clink against when you’re celebrating. These are the people who most understand you and keep you sane.

The people you meet at workshops and conferences. Hearing success stories, learning the craft, and meeting new friends fire up the motivation batteries.

All these people will bolster your confidence as a writer and charge up your motivation to keep going. You’ll see you’re not so strange, the struggle is worth it, and your dreams can come true.

What kind of support do you have? Where do you get your motivation from when it wanes?

Q is for Quarantine

Have you ever thought about putting your main characters under quarantine? Not because of illness, but simply to isolate him/her from other characters while learning about them.

It’s easier to unearth the emotional and motivational stuff that’s hidden deep inside our characters for the purpose of crafting a better story. Imagine you have your character in a private room, free of distraction and that he/she is relaxed and open to a frank discussion.

If, for example, your book has romantic overtones, there are some questions that would be important to ask. (For the sake of this exercise, the main character will be A and the secondary ones will be Character B, and so on.)

·         How does Character A feel about Character B?

·         Does A know why he feels this way about B?

·         What, if anything, would change A’s feelings about B?

·         Does B have any character traits that A can’t stand?

·         How does A feel about being in a long term relationship with B?

·         How would A feel if he never saw B again?

·         How does being with B affect A’s behaviour?

·         How does A’s relationship with B make him feel about himself?

·         Does A recognize how his attitude changes toward other characters as the story progresses?

·         Ask yourself whether the storyline improves/falters if you add/remove secondary characters.

Bear in mind that the answers to the questions above may surprise you and can send the story sailing into uncharted waters. However, I think it is important to explore in several directions as the answers you get may open up fascinating plot lines, or perhaps the information that’s revealed can be used in another novel.

What other questions can you think of to ask your character/s about their relationship with other people in your story?