Keeping Yourself Motivated (When Your Writing Needs a Retreat - Part 3)

The second workshop with Isabel Costello at the retreat was about Motivation, and followed on from Inspiration the previous day. It was based around a series of workshops that Isabel already runs with Voula Tsoflias, called Resilience for Writers, but the skills - once learned - can be applied to any life situation.

The definition of motivation is much easier to pin down, and less subjective, than that of inspiration; 'the desire or willingness to do something; enthusiasm.'

Now, I've had slumps. Times when I simply can't be bothered to do the thing I know I need to do. It's lost it's spark; I've fallen out of love with it; someone has prevented me; I don't want to do it, or Life gets in the way. So this workshop really helped me to think through what motivates me - and how I manage to claw myself back from setbacks.

First, we were asked WHY we wrote. The reasons were many and varied. My own were to encourage children to read, and because fantasy is a chance to leave the real world behind and immerse myself in another place. And because I enjoy creating those other worlds...

Some of the other reasons were;

• I enjoy it
• characters can do/say the things I can't
• I can broach difficult situations
• I can't not
• I love words
• it's a safe place to be somebody else
• to connect with other people
• because no-one else is me.

NOBODY said 'to get rich and famous.' 

Have you ever listed the positive qualities of your writing? I bet most of the time you end up saying 'it's not my best. It's not very good. It's probably rubbish...' We were challenged to write down three good things about our writing. The qualities were very personal, and in some cases demonstrated how difficult we find it to accept that we do things well. Was it because we were women and not used to 'bigging ourselves up'? Or our British restraint? 

Having listed these positives, how often did we allow ourselves to think those thoughts? My answer was 'every time I read a badly-written book.' But even then, it's not very often... So what ration of time did I spend taking time for positive reflection compared to negative criticism? Well...let's just say 'could do better.'

To build on the idea of being positive about our writing, we were invited to recount our proudest or happiest writing moment. They were; 

• being anthologised - it was like being made a saint. (This one resulted in the person being referred to as 'Saint X' for the rest of the day - but we all knew what she meant.)
• finishing a story - this is a huge one! (So many people 'have a story to tell' but never actually write it or get to the end of it once they start it.)
• a friend reading the author's book about a family issue which subsequently gave the friend hope for her own situation. (How often does sharing our own hard experience help someone else?)
• overcoming the fear of having dyslexia to reading aloud for the first time in a writer's group. (Fear can be an old, old friend...it's good to be able to kick its butt every now and then.)
• winning a competition at a comedy festival. (Always a fabulous moment.)
• when the agent read the author's book on the train, and ended up laughing so hard, the man sitting opposite her moved away. (What more could you ask for, when writing comedy?)
• attending an assembly, watching children act out a story they'd written collectively, based on a character created by the author. (Still gives me the grins, years later!)
• the debut novel launch party! (Celebration most definitely in order.)

We decided we should celebrate our fabulousness - and visualise success to make it happen.

And that's where the resilient thinking comes in. Because we're used to focusing on the negatives - I'll never get published, I'm a rubbish writer compared to..., things will never get better - and our negative thoughts make us feel bad and then we act in unhelpful ways, (albeit not always consciously) we need something to help us 'to recognise and adapt unhelpful thoughts and beliefs to recover more quickly from setbacks'. 

It's based on CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - which encourages you to change the way you think about how you feel, and change the way you feel about how you think.

This was demonstrated by Isabel asking us to place different words relating to feelings into quadrants labelled: negative emotions, high energy; negative emotions, low energy; positive emotions, high energy; and positive emotions, low energy. There was quite some discussion during this activity, and it got quite emotional as certain negatively charged words struck a chord with us. Once the words were down - there was no right or wrong answer as to where they should go - Isabel relabelled the quadrants. They became zones of survival mode, burnout, inspired, and recovery. As you might expect, all of us felt we created our best work when experiencing feelings that resided in the positive emotion areas, although most of us associated this with 'recovery' feelings rather than 'inspired' ones. The trick was to recognise your own personal sweet spot, and do your best to move yourself from either of the negative quadrants back into it. 

All of us looking very thoughtful, trying to decide if the words were in the 'right' places
(Moira's photo) 

There was also a lot of discussion around what happens to put us into the negative emotion areas. Husbandly interruptions featured highly (!), with social media a close second. There were much bigger issues mentioned too - lost publication deals, unsupportive friends, family crises - which were obviously situations that lay outside of our control.

What DID lay within our control was how we thought about all of them. Yes, we would acknowledge the situation and the pain it caused, but we didn't have to let it dictate what happened afterwards. 

This has to be something you learn to do, because it requires a certain level of self awareness and that isn't always an easy thing to develop. For a start, in order to be more self-aware, we have to expose our vulnerabilities - one of the retreatees likened it to picking a scab and allowing yourself to bleed - and the places where those vulnerabilities stemmed from. That's not an easy or comfortable thing to do, but if it's understood why we might be feeling the way we are and can then rationalise our catastrophic thoughts as a result, perhaps we stand a chance of changing our actions that follow into something more positive. 

I think I'm already fairly resilient-ish regarding writing. For example - I've picked myself up after rejection. Sometimes, I admit, I got depressed and didn't write. At others, I got angry and thought 'I'll show you'. I know which worked better for me... I realised that it's easier to apply to writing - because that's more in MY control. I find it harder to apply the same principles to situations in my life when I'm not in control of external factors and I'm more emotionally affected, but I'll keep trying.

Going back to motivation then...resilient thinking can help keep you working on a project - like trying to get a novel published and it taking ten or more years (StarMark!) to achieve. But it might need something extra too. Here are a few things that were suggested. 

Make a list of achievable goals. Especially if, like me, you write a long list of BIG things and end up feeling overwhelmed. Break it down into smaller chunks, cross off part-jobs. Or - and yes, I do this! - add completed jobs that didn't originally feature on the list, to the list, simply for the satisfaction of crossing something off! 

Set a time limit. Tell yourself you're going to write for an hour. That's all. Just an hour. And then get on with it. The Writing Room offers extreme versions of this - you set yourself a goal for the session in a room full of writers, and at the end you see what you've achieved. 

Set a word count instead. Doesn't matter how many, but be realistic about how many words you think you can achieve in a specific time period. And if it proves to be too high, don't feel bad about changing it down until you hit a number that seems to be working out for you.  

Visualise your success. It does work, because your conscious and subconscious brain try to come into alignment, but you need to remember that what 'success' means is different for everyone. What is your personal measure of success?

Celebrate the steps along the way, not just the destination arrived at. End of a chapter, a thousand words, finishing the first s****y draft...

And finally, a personal faith-based example of my own; years ago, I was struggling to pray in a particular way. A visiting minister preached about how he'd had exactly the same problem, and shared the advice he was given. 'Pray in the way that you CAN,' he was told. 'Not in the way that you CAN'T.' 

Ultimately, I reckon to keep ourselves motivated in writing, we each need to write in the way that we can, not in the way that we can't. And to do that successfully, we need to be able to recognise both what keeps us in our personal positive sweet spots, and what we can do to make it easier to get back there when life takes us to the dark side.

So here's to finding the silver lining in every cloud, and keeping going when things get tough.