Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

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Horma
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Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#1 Post by Horma »

Hi, haven't been here in a while.

As someone with fair writing skills but little patience and motivation I was wondering whether an extensive writing course would be helpful or not. Writing was my passion when I was a kid, now words don't seem to flow. I've been to some short courses but they didn't work. My main problems are committing and unorganized ideas.

Also, I read only about 5 novels a year at most. I know that's not good for someone who wants to be creative. I just don't find a spark in most books I check out.

I constantly think about just giving up and hiring someone else to write the script for my VN. That to me is a sign that my ideas themselves are worthless and that I'm just fooling myself. I can't seem to break this cycle.

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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#2 Post by LateWhiteRabbit »

I'm not a doctor, but you may want to get yourself checked out for depression.

Some of what you are describing are classic symptoms of untreated depression - a general lack of excitement or joy found in hobbies or tasks you used to love, low energy, low self-esteem.

I've suffered with it myself and treatment can do a world of good. I'd get a professional to check you out, and the writing will work itself out once you aren't depressed anymore.

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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#3 Post by Horma »

Thanks, I know I have depression and I am being treated. Perhaps I should just relax and let the treatment work before taking on huge workloads?

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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#4 Post by Mammon »

Well, I'm afraid that if you have depression the following might not work, especially with writing it's tough. It requires pure motivation to start writing and overcome writer's block, it's hard to judge and consider your work as any good, and will probably require at least one tireless friend to act as your cheerleader undeterred by your self-dismissive comments and wish to let your project fade into the background never to be mentioned when it's not going that well. Overcoming that is a whole 'nother matter.

Assuming the OP though:
A writer's course might be a good action if you don't know what to do, need some guidance within your writing and learn certain tricks and guidelines. Against patience and motivation it will do little good. It might improve them for the duration of the course, for that course will give you specific deadlined assignments you have to turn in (even if it's sub-par) or give you specific periods where you're supposed to write. However, once the course is over you'll find that nothing changed. Not unless you (as the course teachter might tell you as well) make changes to your schedule.

If you have little motivation, little flow, no committing to writing, you'll have to get a certain solid period of time in the week reserved to writing. It's not only that you can't get writing done, but also because starting is a big hurdle and other things you can do will seem much more appealing than writing. Some writers are very dedicated to their stories, I too can sometimes find myself so overflowing with motivation that I actively seek to get back to writing whenever I'm doing something else. At other times I'm not to eager to get back to it either. When I got Skyrim, I didn't write much for a month. And just two days ago I was at the end of a 24 day hiatus of writing my project because I was writing something else.

You need to get proper times where you dedicate your time solely to writing without exception or excuse. While I don't really need it for writing, I have it for art though; there are a few podcasts with weekly updates I listen to. Unless I put them in the background of an art session, I can't listen them. That way I get weekly reminders to get my ass back into gear, motivating me to do more art even if I'm reluctant to get back to it.

About reading too few novels: that's not how inspiration works. It matters not how many you read, but that you read that one giving you the spark of inspiration you need. Even if you read 5 novels and just one gives you a story, that's still one story a year. You finish your projects faster than that? And if you give up halfway, that's usually a matter of having multiple projects. I have the absolute law to never have more than one project to work on. I can get an idea for a story and write an outline for it so I don't forget, but not a single scene. Never start a new project. The fresh smell of a starting story will direct your motivation from the other one, until your old project is all but dead. And once your new project is where the old one was, a newer project comes and takes the wind from under that project's wings. Result; you'll never finish a project. So NEVER start a new project unless you finished your old one or are fullheartedly willing to abandon it.
Last edited by Mammon on Tue Feb 27, 2018 3:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#5 Post by LateWhiteRabbit »

Horma wrote: Tue Feb 27, 2018 11:58 am Thanks, I know I have depression and I am being treated. Perhaps I should just relax and let the treatment work before taking on huge workloads?
Don't beat yourself up over setbacks. Celebrate small wins and progress.

And your doctor probably told you, but it can take a while to dial treatment in, so it can still take some time for symptoms to fade away. Keep in mind too that you will have to build old habits back that lapsed while you were depressed.

Take it one day at a time and relax. "Live for the day." Don't stress about tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year. Take it one day at a time. A day is manageable and measurable, and if it goes badly, a new one is only a night's sleep away.

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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#6 Post by Imperf3kt »

I have my own views on "depression" that don't match with everyone here, so I'll skip discussing that.

However, I believe the problem here has nothing to do with depression and instead stems from the change in atmosphere.

You say that when you were younger, you'd write all sorts of things, and enjoy doing it. Have you read any of those lately?
I have books I wrote from when I was in highschool, over ten years ago, and the content makes me cringe. But why?
Because when I was a teenager, I didn't care what anyone thought, as long as I enjoyed it, I would write whatever came to mind. There was no pressure to 'get it right' or 'make it interesting', there was just 'I want to write this, so I will'.

So what changed? Whats different today that is causing the blockage? You still write what you want, you're still free to make your story what you want it to be. Why is it so much harder?
My opinion, is that you are no longer writing for yourself. You have slowly transitioned to writing for others, and with that transition came expectations.
No longer could you add just 'whatever'. Your story must have structure, it needs direction, it must be grammatically correct and not sound out of place, it must meet current trends and expectations that you came to learn from commercial works.
No longer are you writing for what you want, you are writing for what you think you should, and that is causing your lock up.

So what I suggest, is to dial back the pressure. What are you writing? You are writing your visual novel. It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to make sense, as long as you are happy with it. Don't confuse being happy with it, for being proud of it, and the words will flow frerly again. Just, try not to return to the same cycle of write, evaluate, try again. Drop the evaluation, that should be done last, once you are finished.
I assure you, the Mona Lisa was an ugly blotch of paint while the artist created it. Only by finishing it, did its true beauty shine through.
Warning: May contain trace amounts of gratuitous plot.
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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#7 Post by Horma »

Here's what I've managed to write this week. Any feedback is appreciated. Especially on whether there's enough description and if there are any logical holes. Content warnings: murder, mention of suicide (are these needed for this?)
Leaky eyes, rotting brains

Beginning

I knocked on Annie’s door. She came to open, wheezing like a walrus.

Annie: Hello! Are you Evelution02?
Charlotte: Yes, nice to meet you too, Annie_is_OK.
Annie: Yay! You’re even prettier than I imagined!
Charlotte: Ha ha.
Annie: Oh, sorry! I sound like a pervert.
Charlotte: It’s fine, it’s fine. You’re beautiful too.
Annie: Now you’re just being a nice girl.

Giggling, she led me inside.

Annie: So, am I wrong to think your name is Eve?
Charlotte: Yes, it’s actually Charlotte. But I take no offense.

After a moment of idle banter, I made my first move.

Charlotte: Can I… kiss you?
Annie: Ooh, my heart is going crazy! Do you really want someone like me?

I gently pushed my lips against hers. Warm tears rolled from her eyes to my mouth.

Charlotte: Why are you crying?
Annie: I can’t believe I finally found someone that likes me for who I am. I thought all this grease under my skin would kill me before I would get my first kiss.
Charlotte: It’s alright, I’ll be there for you.
Annie: …Thank you.

We kissed again. She placed her hand on my butt. I flinched.

Annie: Sorry! I got horny again!
Charlotte: No need to apologize. Is there a balcony here? I need some fresh air.
Annie: Sure, I’ll show you the way.

The balcony had a perfect view down to the empty winter streets. Annie was going to leave, but I asked her to stay.

Charlotte: Have you felt suicidal anymore?
Annie: Sometimes. Life is so lonely. Only Dad comes to see me and he keeps bitching about how I should eat less and exercise more. Not that easy, you know.
Charlotte: I understand. Life is lonely for me too. Without my sister…

Annie wrapped her fleshy arms around me.

Annie: Aww, don’t cry. She’s waiting for you, I swear.
Charlotte: And your mother is waiting for you.

With all my strenght, I pushed her against the railing. It was surprisingly easy to make her lose balance. Soon she was upside down, hanging over the edge by my weakening grip on her leg.

Annie: Charlotte, please… Save… me…
Charlotte: Sorry, you’re too heavy.

I let go and watched as she dropped. She painted red on white as she hit the ground. All I needed to do now was to place a stepladder on the balcony and quietly leave the home of my first victim.

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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#8 Post by Horma »

By the way, what do you do when you have lots of ideas and a drive to start working with them all at once? Then comes the time when none of them interest you that much anymore. This repeats about every month.

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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#9 Post by Imperf3kt »

I set them aside and return to them after a short break. Maybe 2 - 3 months.
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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#10 Post by Kuiper »

Horma wrote: Tue Feb 27, 2018 11:58 am Thanks, I know I have depression and I am being treated. Perhaps I should just relax and let the treatment work before taking on huge workloads?
When you use the phase "huge workloads," it makes me question how you're approaching this.

What is your goal? When you're a working professional with deadlines, then of course your goal is to create a piece of work that meets spec to make your editor and publisher happy. In that case, you do need to be concerned with "workload" and productivity. However, until you reach that point, your goal is a lot more nebulous. If I had to guess, I think for most of us, the goal is "I want to be a better writer."

Some of us have more concrete goals, like "I want to get this specific story written." And writing stories is important, because the best way to improve your skill as a writer is through practice. But I think long-term, most of us are focused on the goal of wanting to become better writers. And looking at writing through that lens, I think it might be helpful to approach writing not as a task that you're trying to complete, but a skill that you're trying to hone.

That sounds a bit nebulous, so I'll try to explain it with an analogy.

Playing a guitar is a skill. People understand that the first time you pick up a guitar, it's not going to sound like "real" music. You spend some time learning to pluck the strings, learn basic chords, and spend many hours practicing in the privacy of your own bedroom, working to acquire the skill that will allow you play music that people actually want to hear. Also, people understand that to learn to play the guitar, you must actually pick up a guitar and start plucking strings. You don't learn to play the guitar by listening to guitar music; I've spend thousands of hours listening to people play the guitar, yet I could pick up an instrument and not know the first thing about playing it.

Now, any time the fledgling musician picks up her guitar to practice, does she have a concrete goal like, "Today I'm going to work on recording a new song," or "Today I'm going to compose a new piece of music?" Probably not. Probably she has a goal as simple as, "I want to practice, I want to gain experience, and an hour from now, I'll have one more hour of experience and practice than I do right now." She can then break that goal down and say, "Today, I'm going to practice these basic chords," or "Today, I'm going to practice this specific song that I've been struggling with," but the musician who is learning to play guitar is more focused on building up a skillset than producing a product.

Sometimes, you have a writing session that's fantastically productive, where you sit down, bang away on the keyboard, and several hours later have several thousand words of prose and dialog to show for it. Other days, you sit down, you struggle a bit, you maybe write a few pages and have to throw them out, or you spend a lot of time thinking about "how should these characters be acting right now?" These days can be frustrating. What's important to realize is that these "unproductive" days are not a waste of your time. Struggling is a part of the process of becoming a writer.

If we were only obsessed with being "productive" and just measured the number of words we were able to write on a given day, we'd only stick to doing things that we find easy. And simply repeating the parts that you find easy isn't how we become better as writers. Sometimes, you have to look at the hardest part of a project, and say, "I'm going to tackle this, even if it's going to be a slog, and an hour from now I might not have anything to show for it other than having thought about it and tried several things that didn't work, and that's okay because thinking about a problem and trying things that don't work is part of the process." Not only is it an important part of the given project that you're working on, but it's also important to developing your skills as a writer. And take heart, because by struggling with a problem now, you're preparing yourself and equipping yourself with the skills to deal with the same challenge when it comes up in future projects.

Your long-term goal, I'm guessing, is to become a better writer. That is a goal that is reached slowly through incremental improvement over months and years of consistent practice. Your short-term goal might be, "I want to get this story written," and it's good to have concrete goals like that to keep yourself accountable (so that you're actually giving yourself a reason to write, rather than just procrastinating). But on any given day, your goal can be as simple as, "At the end of today, I want to be a better writer than I was yesterday." Maybe that means making progress on your current project, but maybe it means taking a break from your "main" project to write some flash fiction, or a short writing exercise, or maybe going back to something you wrote when you were younger and critiquing it and thinking about what you might do differently if you had to do it now. Maybe it means going outside to take a walk and think about the characters and story away from the keyboard, because sometimes when you're "stuck" the best way to get un-stuck is by getting away from the blank page.

Another important thing to realize is that when your focus is on self-improvement, it really alleviates the burden of having to produce something excellent every time you sit down to write. When you first start off, you're not going to be able to write something that's as good as novel written by an experienced author. And that's okay. Nobody expects you to write a great novel on your first attempt, anymore than they'd expect you to give a world-class guitar performance the first time you picked up an instrument. Is the story you wrote "good" compared to other writers? That should be irrelevant. What you should care about is whether you're improving.

Today, you might not be able to write something as good as Jane Austen. But you can be better today than you were yesterday.
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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#11 Post by Horma »

Thanks. On one writing forum I was told that any serious writer, professional or not, writes at least a thousand words every day. That made me stop writing for a good while, but in the end, it was just a recycled piece of Stephen King's advice for those who want to write novels as a day job. It's just that I take almost anything at a face value and let it affect my life. Damn my autism.

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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#12 Post by Kuiper »

One phrase I often find myself repeating amidst forum advice is "tools, not rules." We often tend to take advice that emerged as, "Hey, this is something that's helped me in my writing, and it's helped a lot of other writers as well" and parrot them as these universal maxims. Things like "Don't use passive voice," or "You need to have sympathetic characters," or "You should write every day."

Most of these statements, when you break them down, come from a valid position. For example, active voice is often more engaging than passive voice, and most good writing makes use of active voice rather than passive voice. However, it would be a mistake to take this observation and try to translate it into an ironclad rule that says "A good writer never uses passive voice." Likewise, sometimes you want to "break the rules" and write a main character who isn't sympathetic. Your mileage tends to vary even more when it comes to things that are literally tools and techniques. For example, someone could come and say, "Ever since I bought a moleskine notebook, my productivity has shot through the roof because I just love jotting notes in it all day. I just love the feeling of the binding and the pages, and that causes me to reach for it whenever I'm bored." And that could be totally valid. For that particular person, the purchase of a moleskine notebook could be the difference between being uninterested in writing and being highly motivated. But it would be a huge mistake to then say, "I must buy a moleskine notebook if I want to be a productive writer." What works for one person may not work for you. Heck, what works for most people might not work for you. Some people use a QWERTY keyboard, I use a different keyboard layout altogether, and though switching keyboard layouts has made me slightly more efficient as a writer, I spend very little time evangelizing for alternate keyboard layouts because there is no "correct" keyboard layout; you just need to find something that works for you. I found myself more comfortable after switching keyboard layouts, whereas there are lots of people who would find the process of switching to be a difficult process and a huge hindrance to productivity without substantial benefit. The "correct" tool is the one that makes you a more effective writer.

I'm not saying you should ignore most writing advice. Most of the things that we tend to parrot as maxims are repeated so much because they tend to be true most of the time. But most does not mean all. When you encounter a piece of writing advice, by all means, try it out and see if it makes you a more productive or effective writer. But the moment that you discover that piece of advice doesn't apply to you or the thing you are writing, discard it. Remember, these are all tools that are nice to have in the toolbox for when you need them, but they are not rules which must be rigidly adhered to at all times. One of the points of learning the "rules" is once you know why they exist, you also come to understand when it's appropriate to break them.

This becomes really apparent when you realize that many pieces of common writing advice are contradictory. There are some authors who say, "I need a detailed outline before I start writing. If I don't take the time to outline, then my plot will end up as a jumbled and incoherent mess." And there are other authors who say, "I never outline anything. I figure out the story as I write. If I planned the story before actually writing, it would suck the joy out of the process and I'd lose all motivation to write." So, who's "correct?" Well, both of these authors are "correct" in the sense that they've found a writing approach that works for them. But neither approach is "objectively correct." Starting with an outline and writing by the seat of your pants are two different approaches that both have advantages and disadvantages. Try both approaches and see which works best for you, but don't force yourself to follow someone else's approach if it's not working for you. One of the purposes of practicing and focusing on self-improvement is taking the time to experiment with different approaches and figure out which tools and mindsets are (and aren't) going to work best for you.
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Re: Writing woes: Self-pity and lack of motivation

#13 Post by Mutive »

As far as writing goes...

Let's start with that you're unlikely to make a lot of money at writing, especially not enough to support yourself. (I've made something like...$500 from writing. This is more than a great many people I know and puts me a short story away from SFWA membership...but also isn't enough to cover rent even for a month and probably works out to like $0.25/hr.) So doing it for money is kind of silly unless you're really good at finding ways to monetize writing.

This also makes me (personally) disinclined to pay for classes to become better. Paying $1,000 to make maybe $20 isn't a great return...so it's probably NOT worth taking a class from a financial perspective.

With that said, writing is a hobby I love and will probably do until I die. If you enjoy it, no reason not to! Just no reason to *force* yourself to do it, either, unless you really, really want to.

To get back to your question - would a class help? Maybe. If you find it fun and inspiring to be with other writers, go for it! There are almost certainly worse uses of money.

Alternately, there are a lot of resources online that are free that you may enjoy for improving writing.
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