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Cathartic Denouement Crew
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 Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 5:31 pm
Okay, so. My NaNo was a horrible failure this
year. Worse than last year's failure. And I don't
mean failure in the sense that it's garbage.
There wasn't enough to be considered anything,
garbage or otherwise.
Part of the problem was just a lack of time overall.
But part of it was just a lack of motivation to write.
SO, I tried that 750 words thing, thinking, "Well,
maybe I'll do my own sort of personal NaNo to
make up for not having done it." I tried to do fiction,
and that didn't work. So I ended up ranting, and
managed to churn out 750 words every day for
a good week. Not what I had had in mind to do,
but at least I was writing, y'know?
Then I went out of town and all that went down
the drain. And now I can't even find the motivation
to do that.
[[ Obviously, as evidenced by my last two years
of NaNo, I'm fairly bad at finishing things that I
start. One of my Resolutions is to fix that. ]]
Like, I have some characters that I've been sort
of toying around with, wanting to do something
with, but I can't come up with precisely what
to do. Or I have another story that I tried to do
for NaNo in 2009, but never came close to finishing,
but I really need to work on reorganizing my thoughts
for that. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any
motivation even to do that.
Soooo... any suggestions? What do y'all do when
you need to get your writing mojo back?
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Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2011 1:34 pm
When I really cannot write there are only three things I have found that can get me rolling again:
1. Freewriting. And I mean in the sense of completely punctuation-free, house-of-grammatical-horrors, no-editing-ever freewriting. Just word barf into a text document. It doesn't even have to be in sentence fragments. Often I end up ranting at myself as if I were a mean editor, and I discover how I can make my story better. I realize that sounds nuts, but I am nuts. So it kind of works for me.
2. Take a 20-30 minute walk with my mp3 player to clear my head.
3. Sit there and force myself to write with no distractions or excuses. This is tough and I hate doing it, but it's the only thing that got me through November (and several creative writing courses before that... haha). For the first half of the month I didn't allow myself to talk to anyone for more than a few minutes until I had finished at least half my word count. I wrote when I was sick, I wrote when I'd rather have been cooking, I wrote when I'd rather have been doing yard work.
After a long time of writing and failing to write, I don't think there is such a thing as "writing mojo". Writing is just like any other kind of work-- you show up every day, you get the work done. Sometimes it's awful and sometimes you're just on it and the time flies by. But if you aren't writing, you aren't writing. If you don't write a bunch of terrible soulless s**t on the days when you didn't want to write at all, you might never get to the point when everything kindles and suddenly your dreams are coming alive on paper (or your computer screen, as the case may be). So my advice would be not to wait on the mojo in the first place.
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CageNightwind Vice Captain
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Posted: Mon Jan 10, 2011 1:46 pm
Sometimes inspiration and motivation never come when you want them to.. Actually usually they don't.. You just need to find ways or reasons to push yourself to write.. Freewriting like Waltz suggested is always a good exercise. Just let the words flow no matter how little sense it makes.
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Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2011 7:22 am
Waltzkrieg When I really cannot write there are only three things I have found that can get me rolling again: 1. Freewriting. And I mean in the sense of completely punctuation-free, house-of-grammatical-horrors, no-editing-ever freewriting. Just word barf into a text document. It doesn't even have to be in sentence fragments. Often I end up ranting at myself as if I were a mean editor, and I discover how I can make my story better. I realize that sounds nuts, but I am nuts. So it kind of works for me. 2. Take a 20-30 minute walk with my mp3 player to clear my head. 3. Sit there and force myself to write with no distractions or excuses. This is tough and I hate doing it, but it's the only thing that got me through November (and several creative writing courses before that... haha). For the first half of the month I didn't allow myself to talk to anyone for more than a few minutes until I had finished at least half my word count. I wrote when I was sick, I wrote when I'd rather have been cooking, I wrote when I'd rather have been doing yard work. After a long time of writing and failing to write, I don't think there is such a thing as "writing mojo". Writing is just like any other kind of work-- you show up every day, you get the work done. Sometimes it's awful and sometimes you're just on it and the time flies by. But if you aren't writing, you aren't writing. If you don't write a bunch of terrible soulless s**t on the days when you didn't want to write at all, you might never get to the point when everything kindles and suddenly your dreams are coming alive on paper (or your computer screen, as the case may be). So my advice would be not to wait on the mojo in the first place. This. 100%. I write for at least three hours a day, and five if I can manage to get all the trivial bullshit of showering, eating, and laundry done in time after I get home from work. I'm not saying that it's productive or even encouraging to force yourself to write sometimes, but it has to be done if you're in a funk where your creativity just doesn't seem to want to flow naturally. Personally, I have several projects on the go at once for when I get especially bad cases of "writer's block." I have one document set aside for moods of particular negativity/homicidal rage -- beyond that, I can usually twist whatever mood I'm in into the document of whatever story I'm working on at present. I'm still only halfway through my nano story. I had gotten to 57k at one point, then I went back and edited all the garbage out of chapters 1 and 2, and now I'm down to 49k again. (My pride took such a hit!) But it's the push and the drive to keep going despite your reluctance to write that will get the projects done. You just have to keep focused. cool
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