by Rena Sherwood

Created on: April 05, 2010

Even professional writers have a hard time dragging themselves to the desk to write.  If you are professional writer, then just looking at your piles of bills will often be a good enough motivation to get writing.  But if you're not a professional writer, or write to supplement your income, then you need other motivational tactics.

Trick Yourself Into Writing

Perhaps only writing articles, fiction or screenplays is what you consider "writing."  But writing emails, shopping lists, putting together invoices, posting on forums about your favorite celebrity or hobby – this is also writing.  It may seem silly at first, but all writers need to warm up before they can get really get the words flowing.  Just the physical act of plodding out one word after the other will help warm up the mental muscles used for writing.

Usually, after a few minutes of hour of this type of writing, your ideas for your particular writing project start to flow.  Then you can get to it.  Don’t stop to edit yourself as you get the ideas out.  Just get them all out and then go back and proofread.  There always seem to be enough time for proofreading but not enough for the actual writing.

Revising Old Stuff

This is another way of warming up the mental writing muscles and to trick your brain and body into writing. Get out an old poem, short story, Helium article or whatever and revise it.  What could be edited out?  What questions are left unanswered?  Could it have a better title?  Would a pithy quote help tie all of the ideas together? 

Deciding what should be left alone and what should stay uses the same mental skills as writing down a first draft.  Although you may not be constantly writing out new or replacement words, you are still putting all of the written words through your writer's mind.  If you have a bit of the perfectionist about you, just correcting all of the grammatical, formatting and spelling errors may be all you need to get writing for the day.

The Reward Ploy

Remember when your parents said, "You can’t have dessert until you eat all of your vegetables?"  Use that discipline of eating all of your vegetables (or whatever chore your parents wanted you to do) to get started writing.  Only, you are the one that can dole out the reward.  Writing for a very tangible reward can be a powerful motivating force.

If you are the undisciplined type, then reward can’t be brought into the home until after your client pays you.  You could also have housemates hide a reward (like a special chocolate bar or a DVD) until you show them your completed project. 

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