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Writing motivation always fades on a long writing project. Here are seven ways to keep going, starting with why you should never reread from page one.
There’s a moment in every long writing project when you realize you no longer care about it.
You once described your topic to people at parties, at length. And now the sight of the file name makes you want to run screaming into another room.
This is normal, and it’s why so many long projects die at the halfway mark and get buried in a grave marked “chapter 4 REVISED FINAL v3.”
Short pieces don’t have this problem. But a dissertation runs for years, a book usually runs even longer, and motivation was never built to hold up across that kind of distance.
But it can be recharged. Here are seven ways.
1-Never reread from page one
This is the motivation killer I see most often, and it’s a sneaky one. It looks like diligence.
You open the manuscript to get back into it, and you start at the beginning because that seems logical and because rereading feels responsible in a way that drafting a rough new paragraph never does. Forty minutes later, you’ve fixed six commas and decided chapter 2 is unsalvageable.
You’ve written nothing.
You didn’t warm up. You went shopping for evidence that the project is bad, and you found some because you were looking.
Reread the last paragraph instead. One paragraph.
2-Stop while you still know what comes next
Hemingway gave this advice in 1935 and followed it himself. Never write until you’ve run dry. Stop mid-scene, mid-argument, even mid-sentence.
Why it works: your brain clings to unfinished business. The supervisor of psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed in the 1920s that waiters could recall unpaid orders in fine detail and forgot them the instant the bill was settled. So, use the nagging to your advantage.
I’d add a refinement. Before you close the file, type a note about what you want to write the next day. Not an outline. Something like “explain why 1970s data is garbage.” Then, the next day, you’ll sit down to a runway instead of a cliff.
3-Put your crisis of faith in the calendar
Somewhere past the midpoint, you will decide the whole thing is worthless. That’s a predictable stage, and it arrives on schedule, like hay fever.
So, schedule it. Find the two-thirds mark of your timeline and write in your calendar: “Today I hate this book.”
When the day comes and you do hate it, you will feel something better than despair. You will feel correct. Naming a thing in advance takes most of the power out of it, a trick that works well with long, uncooperative manuscripts.
4-Write the good part
There’s a section in your project you’re dying to write. Many writers save it like dessert and grind through the dull bits first to earn the right to do it.
Stop trying to earn it. Write it now.
Chapters have no idea what order you wrote them in, and neither will your reader. Meanwhile that section will come out fast and well, and finishing anything at all makes the next thing easier to start.
Curiosity doesn’t keep. Use it while you have it.
5-Keep a record
Track something you can control. Did you show up? Mark the day. How many words did you write? Mark it down. Then work out how many words you have left to write.
If you’re like me, once you hit the halfway point, you’ll find the writing appears to go a lot faster.
Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile analyzed nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people and found the strongest driver of motivation at work was a sense of progress, even tiny progress. When she surveyed managers separately, 95 percent of them guessed wrong — most named recognition and ranked recognizing progress last.
6-Get one reader, not an audience
Future readers are too vague a prospect to move anybody. One actual person expecting pages on Thursday is a different matter.
Pick a person. Agree on a schedule. Send them whatever you have, bad pages included. You’re not asking for feedback (make sure you agree on that upfront). You’re asking them to expect you.
Mild social embarrassment is a surprisingly good motivator, and unlike most productivity tools it costs nothing. (My Get it Done program accomplishes the same thing with some extra instruction thrown in.)
7-Keep a compost file
Open a document called “compost.” Every sentence you cut goes there instead of into the trash.
This sounds like a filing tip, but it’s really a motivation trick because the fear of deleting something good is exactly what makes writers cling to writing they know is bad.
Nothing dies in the compost file. You’ll hardly ever open it again, but knowing it’s there lets you cut without flinching, which is where the speed comes from.
The part nobody tells you
You will not feel motivated most days.
Waiting to feel like writing is a bit like waiting to feel like brushing your teeth. The feeling shows up during the activity, if it shows up at all. Dental hygiene has never required enthusiasm, and neither does chapter 6.
Show up small. Work for 15 minutes. Stop while you still know what comes next.
Then do it again tomorrow.
The compost file makes writing safe. My upcoming Concision Power Hour shows you what to cut and how. Join me this Thursday, Sept. 17 at 1 pm Pacific/4 pm Eastern for The Concision Power Hour (just $35).
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