100 Day Creative Challenge Day 48: Write Motivation
Learning how we are wired and how we work is an important creative challenge and may just help us to get more done.
I wrote my first book in a month. I’d finished work and dedicated a month to writing. I’d get up in the morning and take the kids to school, come home and write pretty much all day until it was time to pick them up. When we got home I’d give them afternoon tea, send them out to play, supervise homework, tidy up and prepare dinner. After dinner I’d work on assignments as I was also completing a post-graduate degree.
In between all this I volunteered for, and led, a creative team and worked most Sundays.
Sometimes the busier you are, the more you get done. I have the gift of time now, even though I still fill my life with busy stuff — even committing to this blog keeps me busy. It makes me write every day, but I should be getting on and finishing my novels!
So can we be both too busy and not busy enough to get things done?
I think our brains need to be in a space of busyness in order to work creatively, but not so busy thoughts are too crowded. Everyone works differently, but I know that when I’m given a deadline I work to it. If I go away for a three-day writing fest, I can write thousands of words a day.
If I have a day with no particular urgency, I can waste the time. Creating urgency by creating deadlines (even if self-imposed) is a great technique to produce more work. Having a word goal every day, a critique partner you share work with each week or finding an accountability person/mentor to check in with are all great ways to keep you on task. (Unless you’re one of those people who are naturally disciplined, freakishly organised and unnaturally perfect!)
Because if you’re trying to write and you have unlimited time, you can procrastinate an unlimited account, but if you have limited time, you rush to the page trying to get something down in the little bit of fragment of time that you have, and you may write a great deal that way. Julia Cameron
