How to regain lost motivation and start writing again
Everything was going well. You were updating your Medium article every day or every week. You’re on a 10-week or 10-day streak. You finally feel like you’ve triumphed against the sloth in yourself. You feel like a hero who can do anything. You feel giddy with the intoxicating sense of victory.
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Until when you came across a Netflix show that lured you into a binge-watching frenzy. Until when you fell in love and started a new relationship. Until when you got hooked to a new game.
‘If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good any more.’ — JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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But you’d still like to get back together with the writer in yourself, don’t you?
Like a fitness freak who has stopped working out and put on weight after Covid, a voice murmurs annoyingly in your head, ‘I need to get back on track by starting writing/working out again!’
There are simple ways to do this.
First of all, let’s try to understand two types of inability to start writing.
The first stems from the inability to come up with an interesting topic.
The second comes from the fear of being unable to write something interesting about a reasonably good topic that you’ve come up with.
I will talk about how to deal with these two types of inability to write in a second.
To combat the first type of inability to start writing, relax, and take your mind off writing for a while.
Let brilliant ideas come to you. Don’t go searching for them.
When coming face to face with the ability to come up with an interesting topic, you could feel tempted to force yourself to sit at your desk until you come up with a good idea.
you replenish ideas by taking your mind off writing for a while.
It’s difficult to actively search for or seek brilliant ideas. You have to create the conditions in which brilliant ideas will likely come to you.
Taking your mind off could take many forms — take a power walk, get a massage, eat out with a friend, watch a movie, play with Lego.
Good ideas often won’t come to us unless we have a relaxed state of mind, when we’re more likely to turn our attention inwards and make insightful connections.
Chances are when you take your mind off writing a little while, your best ideas will come to you when you least expect them to.
To combat the second type of inability to write, just start.
Actions curb fear and prevent perfectionism from coming in your way.
When you hesitate about starting writing, remember that even brilliant writers churn out mediocre works. It is by having the discipline to get to their desk and starting writing every day that they are able to become masters of their trade.
Don’t be afraid of producing bad writing. Just focus on getting started.
Chances are you’ve been too hard on yourself and even works deemed mediocre by yourself will be of some help to one person out there.
When you’re in doubt, just start.
Writing started is writing half finished.
Many of us are hard-wired to finish what we’ve started. Once you’ve started starting, you’re much more likely to finish a piece of writing than when you haven’t started at all.
There are also habits which you can adopt to keep your mind brimming with ideas. One of them include —
Intentionally schedule some time for boredom every day
Cramming in information and overconsumption of social media are two of the best ways to kill inspiration and the writer in yourself.
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To counteract this problem of information overdose, I intentionally set aside time when I immerse myself in boredom. Experiences have told me that once I’ve done that, I will feel much more ready to write.
I do this, for example, by placing an aquarium or a fishbowl in my workplace. I read up on how to take care of a goldfish and try my best to keep it alive.
Taking care of animals takes actual efforts, attention, and time. While I’m taking care of them, staring at how they swim and playing with them every day, however, I get my daily dose of ‘boredom time’. This is usually the time when my best ideas come to me.
Other good ways to do this could be placing a plant in your office or scheduling other forms of relatively less stimulating activities like doing a puzzle or doing calligraphy.
A healthy amount of boredom in life forces ourselves to look inwards and draw little-thought-about connections in our brain.
