“A guy says, ‘I wish someone would come by and turn me on.’ What if they don’t show up? The best motivation is self-motivation.”
~Jim Rohn, US motivational speaker
I haven’t written anything here in a while and it was a break from writing that I hadn’t expected to take. Somehow I have been letting stress and worry, and a little bit of fear, get in the way of my love of writing and my motivation to progress within my writing career and continue moving steadily forward. I stalled. I sat at the computer and stared at blank pages with the pages taunting me with their white empty space. I tried for a while and I just couldn’t get inspired and the words just wouldn’t come.
Now the whole time I was unable to write was not completely wasted because I did do research on some projects that I have on my list to start working on but I still felt quite unproductive. Finally I realized that my stress and fear was increasing and that I couldn’t continue to toss my writing aside in hopes that the stress and fear would go away sooner rather than later. I started to actually research things like what to do for lack of motivation and how to get motivated again.
Guess what? There is not magical cure for writer’s block due to depression and that there is no one right answer of how to move past it. One piece of the same advice from many different successful and accomplished writers that stuck with me was that even when you don’t feel like writing, make a schedule and write anyway. So I wrote out a list for all of the projects that I want to work on and get done and then I mapped out the week and began to decide what projects to work on and on what days to work on them.
Now I don’t know if this is going to work and how well of a job I am going to do at sticking to the schedule that I set out to do but I do know that this blog post that I am writing at this very moment was the first thing of my schedule to do today and as you see I have completed that task. All I can do is take this one day at a time and hope that I do what I set out to do.
I guess I just always thought that it would be like it was when I was a little younger, where the words just flowed out of me and I had to actually stop myself from writing because otherwise I would’ve never slept. Inspiration and the motivation to write was never a problem. I hadn’t planned on life getting in the way and throwing me off my path.
Now I am learning that sometimes inspiration and motivation aren’t just going to show up and tap me on the shoulder and the words can’t always flow that easily. No matter what I still have to write because honestly I can’t see myself being happy doing anything else. I am planting my own seeds of motivation and now I am going to work on steadily moving forward because I can’t afford to take any more steps back.
Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)
Writing as “Jaycee Durant”
https://writetobe.wordpress.com/
http://unpleasantlyplump.wordpress.com/
http://spokenlikeaqueen.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jimmetta-Carpenter/1069480310
http://www.passionatewriterpublishing.com/thediary.htm
Write 2 Be 