5 Ways To Motivate Yourself to Write

It doesn’t matter how experienced a writer you are. You’re bound to feel unmotivated every now and then. Sometimes you can plow through these periods. But at other times, you’ll need to find ways to get excited about your projects again.

I’m like any other writer in this regard. I have good days and bad days. Sometimes a lack of motivation is a result of being sick or exhausted because of other commitments. And sometimes I’m just not “feeling it.” Those are the times when I can literally sit at my desk, staring at my computer screen for hours on end, and be lucky if I turn out a single paragraph.

As writers, we sometimes convince ourselves that it’s not OK to step away — that other things are just distractions or a way to procrastinate. But the way I see it is this: I’d rather spend a couple of hours doing something else and feel motivated to jump back into my writing than spending those hours staring at a screen with little-to-nothing to show for it.

Today I’d like to share some of the things I do when I need to set aside my writing and get myself back in the right frame of mind.

5 Ways I Motivate Myself to Write

Here are some of the things I do when I need to motivate myself to put my butt back in my chair and write.

1. Read a good book.

This can be a book in the genre I’m trying to work in at the time, or even a nonfiction book about writing, publishing, or business. Appreciating someone else’s writing makes me want to get back to my own.

2. Listen to classical music or nature sounds.

I use the Relax Melodies app for most sounds (which I recently posted about here on the blog), and I pull up classical music playlists on Amazon Prime Music. Anything non-vocal and mellow works because it allows me to let my mind wander.

3. Watch a movie.

It might sound more like procrastination, but sometimes a movie puts me back in the mood to write. For example, when I’m working on a horror writing project, I’ll watch something in that genre. Or if I need to motivate myself to write nonfiction, I’ll choose a movie about a writer instead of something genre-specific.

4. Watch an episode or two of Murder, She Wrote on Netflix.

A little Jessica Fletcher goes a long way.

5. Visualize the end result.

Very little motivates me more than visualizing the end result of my work. For example, I might picture the manuscript I’m working on as a book in print. Or if you’re a freelance writer who gets paid after a project is complete, you might visualize the check you’ll receive once your work is finished.

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