I’ll start my 21st post with some (more) words of wisdom from author David Farland, whose #WritingTips I always look forward to in my inbox:
Motivation vs. Habit
On the door at my gym, someone hung a sign that says, “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit keeps you going.”
I began working out regularly over 20 years ago. Since then, I’ve dropped about 75 pounds, and I’ve run or walked something in neighborhood of 22,000 miles. I can’t even imagine how much I’ve lifted in weights. But think about it, if someone had said to me, “Hey, Dave, why don’t you go run 22,000 miles?” it would have taken an awful lot of motivation to get me going.
However, it only took a tiny bit of habit.
Writing is much the same way. A lot of us try hard to get motivated to write a novel. But writing a novel is a lengthy process. Being motivated doesn’t help much, but developing good writing habits helps a lot.
I learned long ago that exercise is hard when you’re starting out. If you run three days, you’ll want to quit at the end of them. That’s when muscle aches and fatigue are the strongest. But if you run for a week, you’ll begin to notice that you feel better on the days that you’ve run. Soon, the day won’t feel complete without some exercise.
Writing is much the same. Jumping into a project is hard. Working on a novel for one day doesn’t really get you very far into it. But if you try making it a habit—if you bundle all of that motivation up and say to yourself, “I’m going to write for one hour a day this week,” you’ll find at the end of the week that you just don’t really feel that your day is complete if you haven’t spent some time engaged in creative recreation.
With my writing workshops, I generally hold them for a week. I try to motivate my students to write daily during that time, if only for a couple of hours. The goal in part is to teach the writers and get them to develop new skills, but just as importantly, I’m trying to get them into the habit of writing.
Quite often it works. I’ve gotten many letters from writers where the writer has said, “Hey, Dave, I got into the habit of writing at your workshop last year, and I’ve just finished my first/second/third/fourth novel!” Whenever I see that, I always feel as if the mission has been accomplished.
So here’s the key to become a writer: Use your motivation to create a writing habit. Long after you have run out of motivation, you’ll still be writing.
As usual with David’s words of wisdom, I find myself unable to express those ideas any better than him.
Full admission: I’ve fallen out of the *habit* of writing fiction daily.
I have plenty of motivation – heaps and heaps of it!
…Translating that into a habit, though (as David describes) is very hard, especially when you let everything else in your life take precedence. For me, this includes the other side of my quest towards authorship: ghostwriting.
I had an epiphany about this time last year. It went something like this:
If I wanted to be a full-time writer (one who could feed himself, and his family), I’d need an alternate source of writing income. More specifically, it had to be something that I was already comfortable doing. I dallied in the realm of B2B (business-to-business) writing for a while, but realized that it induced ZERO passion for me. The switch to ghostwriting came about at the end of a course I took with Ed Gandia, who is one of the best-known B2B writers and coaches in the field. Ed got me in touch with Derek Lewis, the best-known writer in *his* field (business ghostwriting), and my goal of becoming a ghostwriter took off from there.
A year-in, and I feel like I’ve got a good amount of momentum going with my ghostwriting business (you can check it out at my other website, LiteraryGhost.com)… and now, it’s time to get back into the *habit* of writing fiction. Every Day. Even if it’s only a couple hundred words. 🙂
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