What Motivates You to Write?
February 15, 2012 – 3:58 pm
The universal answer to that question is, of course, CHOCOLATE, but I was looking for one that doesn’t increase my hip span. Oh, and wine works too, but after a few glasses I get too sleepy or too loopy to write. My main motivations to keep writing includes my critique partners, my local RWA chapter, and setting concrete deadlines for myself by signing up for a conference, contest, or class.
These last few weeks, I’ve been enrolled in Candace Haven’s Fast Draft class where I committed to write twenty pages per day for two weeks. Think of it like NaNoWriMo on steroids—or more correctly: on speed. I didn’t make the page count every day, but I did finish a first draft of a new novel.
Is it a crappy first draft?
Absolutely.
Will I have to revise the hell out of it?
You bet.
Then why did I do it?
Because I’m a binge writer. By that I mean I work best when I get to spend lots of time vomiting prose on a page. It doesn’t always make sense, it’s rarely pretty, but the bones of the story are there. Being that immersed in my characters makes them do wonderful things. They take me places I didn’t at all intend but are so obviously right for my story. My subconscious is a much more creative person than I am. (This by the way is something Candace Haven swears by and why she started Fast Draft.)
I am not a binge reviser though. I’m quite happy working on second, third, and fourth drafts in pieces and focus on a particular chapter, scene, or sentence to make it perfect. I enjoy obsessing over a word choice for a day or two or three, but only during revisions. If I do that during the initial writing, my first draft never gets past the first three chapters. I have a drawer filled—okay, a couple of computer folders—with perfect first chapters that were never completed. I got bored with the story before I finished a complete draft.
To bring it back around to the title of this post, the Fast Draft class motivated me to get my ass in the chair and crank out a first draft. I learned that I can get a lot done in only an hour or two of writing every day.
Being a natural “pantser,” I had to come up with a way to plan what to write every day, or the story just went around in circles. I learned a way of plotting that works for me. It gives me an overall overview of the structure of the book, where the turning points needs to be, and how to tie the internal and external conflicts together while also relate the advancement of the romantic arch. It’s not an outline, but the method allows me to see my book in bigger chunks, which also helps in the revision process.
I’m a master procrastinator. Long open-ended projects are bad for me, because I start them the week, night, hour before the due date and set myself up for failure. Fast Draft allowed me a short time period in which I needed to get a sub-task done, I got it done. Now I’m dividing my book into chunks and setting deadlines for when the revisions have to be done. Having critique partners waiting for those chunks helps the process tremendously.
Another thing I do to keep my writing motivation up is set deadlines for the whole year. This year I’m going to three writing conferences. My goal is to have a new project to pitch at each of those. Two of them are new projects, one a reworked manuscript.
I’m very sure I’ll hit those milestones, because otherwise I’ll beat myself up to the point where I won’t enjoy the conferences. I’m my own worst critic, which is usually a bad thing, but in this case it helps. And when my loud-mouthed inner voice berate me too much, I silence it with chocolate and wine.
What motivates you? How do you keep your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard?
