Are You Motivated?

Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.
~ Mark Victor Hansen

The word motivate means: To provide with an incentive; move to action; impel.

We all need to be motivated by something. A cause, a dream an ambition. Whatever the case may be we are driven to propel ourselves further no matter what life tosses our way.

Writer’s need to be motivated to write. As they sit at the empty screen they feel perplexed for what to write. Should I finish my novel? Should I write a poem? Maybe I’ll try a short story. All this comes clamoring for attention in our brains and we wind up sitting at the screen doing nothing but looking at what everyone else has written.

I do believe that there needs to be a hunger welling deep inside for you to be motivated to write. If you don’t hunger and crave it, you’ll sit glumly and wonder what you’re even doing behind the screen. I think it is at this point you begin to surf the internet to kill time, you’ve lost your motivation to write so you browse.

This lack of hunger is not a good habit to get into. There needs to be a point of focus before you can feel motivated. By taking a look at the short story you wrote, maybe work on the revision. Maybe try and aim for a better story.

Trying to compare yourself with others will surely DEMOTIVATE you along your path. It’s like having a weed in the garden. The weed will suck all the nutrients that a flower needs to grow. Sure the weed is a pretty yellow dandelion but it is taking away the purpose of a beautiful lawn.

Do we want weeds in our writing? Are we going to allow weeds to come in and suck all of our attention away from what we really want to do, and that is to write! Are we going to allow something else to come along and distract us from our purpose in writing our very best? Why do we as humans need the approval of others so that we can feel good about ourselves? That’s just it, we don’t.

If we allow others opinions to distract us from our purpose then we are not fully focused on what we were dreaming. We dream of being a writer. We focus on writing. We write whatever comes to mind just to say we’re writing. A weed springs up in the way of brutal criticism of our work. Do we STOP writing? No, we pluck the weed out, (that’s a use or lose in the critique world.)

In other words we’re going to take a critique as a blessing. It is a vitamin to our garden. It is feeding us nutrients so that we may be a beautiful bouquet of flowers blooming in the garden.

Motivation~ The act or process of motivating. The state of being motivated.

What are you going to do to get motivated? WRITE! That’s what. And keep doing it because you love it and because writing nourishes your soul!

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars! ~Brian Littrell