Of Mice and Motivation

As something of a part-time, would be, aspiring amateur writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I should be writing.  This of course doesn’t involve any actual writing, and only rarely does it touch on thoughts about content, story, and character.  Mostly, it’s a feeling that I have wasted a lot of time doing meaningless things when all my mind really wants is to express itself through creative means.

I’d like to be honest on this matter.  I am a life-long procrastinator.  Almost without exclusion, I do everything at the last possible moment.  In school, this amounted to projects and reports being hastily completed the night before they were due (often after having had weeks to work on them) and homework often being done on the morning of the day it was supposed to be turned in.  Now, it usually means that I am almost entirely incapable of getting gifts and birthday cards any sooner than the day before the occasion.

I also suffer from a huge motivational deficit; I am not one of those self-motivated individuals that simply gets things done.  I am not much of a doer.  I understand that these are, in actuality, two different problems.  But I think it’s also quite clear that in my case, as I would guess it is in most cases, they compound to make one large problem.

Lack of motivation leads to easy distraction; video games, random articles on the internet that I’m not really interested in, online forums, video games, occasionally interesting television shows, video games are all common sources of distraction that detract from what I feel that I should be doing. 

My struggles with this have been ongoing for somewhere around nine years (which happens to coincide with the time I got out of school and started working full time).  Before that, I didn’t have much problem writing.  Granted, everything that I wrote was likely cliché and poorly done, but I was writing, and I was enjoying myself with it.

I know that I’m not the only one dealing with this problem.  There are countless others out there who face similar difficulties.  It’s a mixture of flaws in my personality that have made if very difficult for me to do anything for myself, to do what I enjoy doing and work towards it as a career.  I wish that I had an easy way to get around it, or that there was some kind of cure.

I do manage to write from time to time (and this blog gives me a way to write that I haven’t really tried before – it serves a purpose even if nobody reads it), and I have completed some of the dozens of stories that I’ve started or thought about.  One short story was for a very small literary magazine run by a couple of professors at a community college.  I wrote all 4,000 or so words, complete with editing and corrections, in one day.  That happened to be the day before the submission deadline.

How do I break past this, though?  What has worked for me in the past?  My wife has been the biggest help, even though it frustrates her to have to do it all the time.  She gives me some rather strong kicks in the ass to get me focused, and her pushing works more often than my own does.  For a little while, I was even getting myself to write regularly, but I don’t think that time counts (I was off work on injury and thus my greatest source of motivation-killer was nullified).

All that I can say is that you have to keep at it.  It’s the same advice that most all professional artists have given at some point, be they writers, painters, musicians, or what have you.  You really do have to work at something all the time if you want to attain it, and I don’t think most people can find real happiness unless they are doing something they love.  For some of us, it’s hard, that’s all. 

I’ve had to ask myself numerous times if my lack of motivation simply means that I don’t want to write like I think I do.  I wonder if I should just give up.  But what else would I do?  There’s nothing else that I can think of that sounds like something I could spend the rest of my life doing.  So I’ll keep trying, and keep working against my own flaws.

I suppose, if there’s a point to all this (and it didn’t get lost somewhere above), it’s that each of us is our own worst enemy.  Whether it’s the harshness of the internal critic, that voice of our deepest insecurities, or our bad habits and character flaws, none of us can accomplish anything meaningful without first striking some kind of inner balance.  I’m still struggling, but I’ve not lost hope.  There’s no great success story here, no life-changing advice.  Only the truth as I understand it.  I’m still on the road, and it’s long and hard for me.

The important thing is to not give up.