Motivation: Struggling to Sit Down and Write

Procrastination

In the original version of this post, I had changed the theme from motivation to procrastination. But after the first paragraph, it became clear that my focus was on motivation after all.
It is a theme I struggle with. The last few years, now that I have all my time to myself, I need to find ways to entice myself to do things. Not just sitting down to write, but also simpler things like eating healthy or taking a shower. Without having a clear goal, this is sometimes hard to do. After all, all the sensible things to do aren’t necessarily the most fun options. It’s way easier and even tastier to go for take-out instead of cooking at home. But, step by step, I motivate myself to opt for better choices.

Teenage Joys

During my teenage years, finding the right motivation wasn’t really an issue. If I look back now and see what I undertook then, I wonder where I got the energy from and the motivation. I wrote fan fiction, and I wrote sex stories. Sometimes I would exchange the fanfiction stories with my friends, but the sex stories were completely my secret. There were no social media then, so I didn’t share anything online. So why did I write? Because I wanted to. Because it made me feel good. I enjoyed spending time in the worlds that I came up with. Validation from others didn’t interest me that much regarding my writing.

Preaching to the Choir

I’ve always written stories for myself since. For the past five years, I’ve been trying to write them professionally and get them published. It’s been tough. Before joining this blogging community, I received no feedback on my writing. My husband was the only one who read my stories, and he is heavily biased.
I tried joining websites like Scribophile, which worked all right. However, it took up too much of my time, commenting on other people’s stories before getting feedback on my work.
I worked with beta readers and editors on my stories, but that still provided little in-depth feedback.

Meagre Successes

I’ve written two bestselling stories: ‘His for Two Nights‘ and ‘From Deirdre to Deedee – an Erotic Bimbofication Tale.’ That’s not because I sold hundreds of copies, but I did sell close to a hundred copies of each. I tried so hard to write a sequel to my bimbofication story, but I couldn’t get it done. I would get halfway through a story, and then get stuck.
I couldn’t find the motivation and perseverance to finish them. It’s something I regret to this day because I continue to sell copies of this story on Amazon.

The Power of Memes

At the moment, I use memes and prompts to get enough motivation to write. What also helps is that other bloggers post five to seven updates on their websites per week. I’m amazed at that amount, so I strive to keep up at least my two posts per week.
And still, it’s hard to sit down and write. It’s easier to scroll through Twitter. If I’m responding to sex blogs, it still counts as work, right?
Or when I’m scrolling through stock photo websites for an hour. That’s also work, right?

Visionless

My main problem is that I don’t have a vision of what I want to achieve with my writing. There’s one thing I know: I want to write. I hope to earn money with it one day, but I don’t have a clear picture of how to get there. So until I find out where I want to go, I write my blog for myself. It’s an outlet for my opinions and for my fantasies. I love reading people’s comments so that I know I’m not entirely talking to myself. But finding the motivation to sit down and write will always be difficult.

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