Hey there! I just came across this blog and im wondering if I could get some advice. I have a lot of trouble keeping motivation for a story. I'll have a new idea that im really excited about, ill write 10-20 pages of it, and then get bored of writing it. Any tips on how to keep myself invested in writing my own stories?
5 Reasons You Lost Interest in Your WIP, Plus Fixes!
It’s not uncommon for writers to lose interest in their WIP. Staying on track, or getting back on track, are skills you’ll acquire with time. Here are some of the reasons you might have lost interest in your WIP:
#1 - You’re Not Sure Where the Story is Going. When you figure out a way into a story you’re excited about, the beginning can be a piece of cake. It’s all set up and inciting incident, which can be really really fun to write. But if you’re not sure what needs to happen after the inciting incident, you can find yourself meandering and get bored quickly.
Fix - If you’re writing a story that is plot-driven or a combination of plot-driven and character-driven (as most stories are these days), it may help to familiarize yourself with Basic Story Structure and also have a look at my post about How to Move a Story Forward.If you’re writing a character-driven story, you can adhere to basic story structure or a more loose structure, but your character’s arc will be the focus of the story. If you think plot and structure may be what’s holding you back, you might spend time on my Plot & Story Structure post master list to read some of the other posts there.
#2 - Something Isn’t Working. Stories are often like a house of cards in that one misplaced “card” can bring the whole thing crashing down. Sometimes you lose interest because an element or event didn’t quite work, and you can feel in your gut that something’s not right, so your brain interprets that as losing motivation. It’s not really that you’ve lost interest in the story… it’s that you’ve lost interest in the dead end path it’s on.
Fix - Go back through what you’ve already written and look for something that’s not pulling its weight. It could be an unnecessary character dragging the story down, a subplot that is cluttering up the story or drawing attention away from the main plot, or it could be a scene/scenes that don’t add to the story. It could even be a combination of these things. If you can find it and fix it, your motivation may return.
#3 - You’re Just Not in the Mood to Write. It could be that your interest in your WIP is just fine, you’re just not in the mood to write. Our brains aren’t always great at interpreting signals from our bodies, including other parts of our brain. The thirst signal is sometimes misinterpreted as hunger, which is why if you’re feeling hungry when you shouldn’t, you should try drinking a glass of water. Sometimes, in the same way, we’re just not in the mood to write and our brains misinterpret that as a loss of interest in our WIP.
Fix - Consider what’s going on in your life at the moment. Are you stressed? Are you distracted? Are you not feeling well? Sometimes you just need to give yourself a few days or weeks to let things resolve, and then you’ll find your motivation has returned. Try doing things to Fill Your Creative Well in the meantime, or try some of the exercises in this post: Getting Unstuck: Motivation Beyond Mood Boards & Playlists
#4 - You’re Overly Focused on Quality. One of the biggest WIP interest/motivation zappers is focusing too much on quality in your early drafts. If you’re fixated on things like description, flow, theme, symbolism, grammar, etc. in your first draft, you’re going to mentally
Fix - Remember, your early drafts should be more about getting the story down and working out the kinks. Don’t worry so much about things like description, grammar, details, etc. until you’ve got all of that hammered out. And remember that the whole point of editing and revision is to polish your draft. You get the story down and make it pretty later.
#5 - You’re Letting Yourself Get Distracted by New Ideas. The thrill of coming up with a new idea is part of the fun of being a writer. One of the pitfalls of being a writer is new ideas sometimes distract you from your WIP. We can be completely into our WIP, then a new idea comes along and our brains say, “Ooo! Look at the shiny pretty!” And off we go. Some writers, particularly seasoned ones, are able to work on multiple WIPs at once, but you should focus on one WIP at a time if you commonly lose interest before they’re finished.
Fix - When you get a new idea, write it down in a notebook and/or in a document on your device. Once the idea is “down on paper,” just forget about it. Imagine that it vanishes once it’s recorded and you close the notebook/document. It takes practice, but you’ll get better at ignoring the pull of a new idea.
Here are some posts from my Motivation post master list that might also help:
alright, bye everyone! this is my official last post on my blog. if you still wanna know my new blog feel free to shoot me a message or an ask, but no guarantees I’ll get back to it very fast. thanks for all the shitposts and other good stuff. adios!
I have $24 to last me til Friday, what should I buy with it?
a pallet of ramen noodles
I hate ramen noodles tho
hmmmmm
bees?
Are you suggesting that I eat bees for a week
This is roughly what I make sure I have in my kitchen all the time along with rough estimates of local prices (MN). I buy a lot of things when they’re on sale and stockpile them.
instant oatmeal packets with fruit in them - $3 probably and this can be breakfast all week and maybe even a lunch or dinner too since you usually get 10 packets
bag of rice - $2-3 depending on size. 1 cup dry rice makes enough for about two meals depending on what you add in. if you get cheap rice, rinse it before cooking
canned beans - usually under $1 per can - mix the can with your rice and you have a meal. chili-spiced beans will make bean tacos. Rinse non-spiced beans before adding to anything.
Tortilla - usually around $3 but you get like 8-10 of them. Tacos, wraps, and quesadillas are all fair game here
lettuce - $2 max around here, either a head of something or bagged precut depending on preference, use as a salad or on tacos
protein other than beans of some sort - probably $5-7 for meat, $2-3 for eggs. sometimes I can get bags of frozen chicken breasts in this price range and each is usually 2 meals if I add in a bunch of veggies. fry/scramble eggs and add to any of the options.
your favorite stir fry sauce - $3ish
vegetables - $5ish. literally anything that you can 1. fry in a pan and 2. you’ll eat. fresh carrots are usually pretty cheap. get frozen if it’s cheaper and you’re strapped for cash/prep time on this part.
alternative to stir fry: pasta (~$2), fresh tomatoes (~$2), cheese (~$3).
cheese and fruit if you have extra - look if your store has loyalty cards for free that you can load coupons on for cheese there’s always one it seems like.
ahh thank you!!!
Reblogging because there’s never knowing who’ll need it.
Adding also: the single most nutritious food on earth is potatoes in their peel. Potatoes + some milk and butter = everything you need. They don’t last all that long, but they’re fairly cheap and the quickest cheat to “How do I not fuck my body up.”
(Cooked potatoes’ll last a while in the fridge. Potatoes nearing the end of their useful lives? Cook them to half-done first, figure out what to do with them later.)
Easiest baked potatoes: slice thinly but not paper-like, spread like cards, brush with oil (a silicone baking brush is totes worth the little it costs), spread salt and pepper (a little less than you think you’d like), cover with foil, stick in oven or toaster-oven at 150C for 40min. (If you have the patience, at that point click up to 180C, remove the cover and add 10-20min.) Reheats well, lasts in the fridge longer than it’ll take you to nom.
Dead-Animal-Free Whole Protein: some legumes + some grain. AKA rice and lentils, or rice and beans. (Maybe some fried onion for flavor; onion’s cheap and stays good a descent while. Fried onion makes everything taste better and keeps forever in the freezer, so frying up a bunch and keeping portions is not a half-bad idea.) (If going for the beans option - lentils are cheaper around here but fuck if I know what it’s like in your area - dump some tomato sauce and oil in; canola or soy are best health-wise, and far cheaper than olive; avoid corn.) Oh, what does instant couscous go for in your area? It keeps for fucking ever, it’s usually cheap, and it takes well to any and all added taste.
If you get to choose, black lentils taste the best and need the least soak-time (0-20min), green lentils are best for cooked stuff and red lentils are best in soups. (Red lentils + potatoes + root vegetables of choice + spices; cut into small pieces, cook, run through the blender if you wanna [stick blender’s awesome], freeze in portions.)
When possible, get instant soup mix. Get the good instant soup mix. (The kind that’s not made primarily of sugar, yeast or both. The rest is optional.) Dump 1/2tsp (or more, but start on the low end) into couscous, or chicken, or sprinkle over potatoes being stuck in the oven. Whatever. It’ll make most cooked-food-type things taste better. And again, lasts forever on the shelf.
If you can have eggs (goodness knows they’re sometimes expensive), dump some tomato sauce in a pan (tomato sauce lasts forever on the shelf), add some oil, onion/beans to cook in it, hot peppers if you wanna, then when it’s nearly ready crack an egg or two in. Hard-boiled eggs last a remarkably while in the fridge, so when eggs reach near the end of their usable lives, just hard-boil and stick in the fridge.
(Have eggs as often as you can, particularly as you have brain-shit going on. You need all the eggs, salt, and 60%-or-more chocolate you can get. Brains are made of cholesterol and salt, so folks with neuro or other brain shit need more of both. Potassium is also aces. You know what has the most potassium? Tomato paste.)
Grated cheese keeps in the freezer for ever. Grated cheese will make a lot of things taste nicer. Preserved lemon juice keeps forever in the fridge. Grated cheese + oil + lemon = instant and awesome pasta sauce that’ll liven up the weeks-old dry pasta in the fridge.
Slices bread also keeps well in the freezer. Try to have half a loaf or a loaf. Dry bread gets cut in cubes, mixed with oil and the aforementioned instant soup, stuck in oven at lowest until properly dry, then kept in an airtight jar to add to soups.
(Over-ripe tomatoes come cheaper. They get turned into soup or sauce, then frozen in portions.)
this is a very good post but why are we glossing over the fact that the alternative to ramen is bees
i have it on pretty good authority that bees are not an affordable eating alternative to ramen.
Seriously, bees are expensive
Trufax.
And speaking as someone who is also living off oatmeal, beans, and brown rice, if you need recipes, I have them!
Today I made 16 bean soup with chicken sausage and it was crazy good and I got 8 servings out of the one batch (froze half). I usually get the cheapest beans I can find, and GOYA bags of beans are usually $1-2. I soaked them overnight,rinsed them, and threw them in a gallon lidded saucepan with 2 boxes of chicken stock (also on sale for $2), two bay leaves, sauteed green pepper, onion, and celery, some garlic from a jar, about two tablespoons of dried herbs de provence,and the “fancy” bit was adding $6 bourbon and apple chicken sausages. You can actually sub veg stock for chicken and skip the sausage and make it vegan and it would still taste great.
Oh and I’ve been doing steel-cut oats. I don’t buy the name brand ones, I just pick whatever store brand/generic I can get for less than $4. They take about ½ an hour to make, but they’re super tasty and I make 2 cups
of dried oats at a time
with dried cranberries and that’s breakfast for 4 days at least.
I’ve also been making black bean soup, red beans and rice, and curried potatoes and chick peas. I got 100 quart and pint take-away containers from Amazon for $20 and they all stack neatly and are perf for one serving of whatever.
Additionally, depending on where you live, whole rotisserie chickens are something like $4-$7 and are easily 4 - 6 servings of protein and on TOP of that, if you stick the carcass in a ziplock bag and then the freezer you have excellent soup makings. Using bones in soup literally squeezes all viable vitamins and minerals out of the suckers. Soup made from lots of bones is great to keep around if you get sick, it’ll feed and sooth you relatively easily and as you get better you can add noodles. ON TOP OF THAT, a quarter to a half cup of soup broth added to a lot of dishes also adds those nutrients PLUS flavor.
Yall are clutch for this lmao cuz ima need this for about the first month after I move
Reblogging cause who knows what your followers are going through rn
I’ll second the recommendation of Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 A Day, it’s really, really good. It was written by Leanne Brown, who was a grad student in NYC working on food stamps for her thesis, and she released the book FOR FREE. Here’s her website.
many stores that have a frozen/grocery section also have bags of frozen veggies for $1 or just a bit over (depends on the veggies). i know target has some good prices on their steam-in-bag veggies if you have a target near you. typically they’re good for 1 full meal (if eating nothing else) or will feed 2-3 people if eating alongside other things.
speaking of target, they really have some nice prices on some of their stuff. if you have one near you, check them out, and their store brand (market pantry) is almost always the exact same stuff as name brand. a big ass bag of chicken nuggets there is $2-3, and while not very healthy, they’re good when you don’t have any options and are hungry.
cabbage is usually super cheap, like less than a dollar per head of cabbage, and you can get a lot out of one head. steam it and throw in a little butter and salt and it makes a good side.
if you work a lot and end up spending a ton on lunches, try yakisobas, if your target carries them. they’d be in the same aisle as the mac n cheese, i believe. they’re similar to ramen so they’re not exactly a healthy option, but i’ll put it this way: before i started bringing those for my lunches, i would spend roughly $8 a day at subway. 5 days a week, that’s $40 a week. so it’d be $160 a month to eat there. then i started grabbing the yakisobas, which are roughly 70 cents a piece at target. 5 days a week is about $3.50 a week. $14 a month to feed myself on my lunch breaks at work. if your workplace has water and a microwave, these might be a good option to save some money.
pancake mix is usually pretty cheap. i buy the pouches where you just add water: $1.25 and makes 5-6 pancakes, super filling, always leaves me almost uncomfortably full if i eat them all myself. but buying the box rather than single serving pouches might be more economical. either way, going for a “just add water” mix would save you from having to grab milk or eggs if you can’t spare the extra.
look in your grocery store for “knorrs pasta/rice sides”. they’re usually around a dollar each, just need to add some milk and water and cook it down, they have lots of flavors and are pretty tasty. one bag will feed one person if eating nothing else with it, or two if eating with other food.
hot dogs are also usually dirt cheap, as long as you’re not getting fancy ones. i personally hate them and won’t eat them unless desperate, but if you like hot dogs, there you go.
another place with pretty good prices: ALDI. if you have an ALDI near you, check them out and see if you can’t get things you get at the grocery store for a better price there.
“You don’t suffer on the same scale as us so I’m just going to ignore your problems” is not and never will be a good argument.
There also isn’t a way to even determine who suffers on what scale. Is there an internationally established oppression index we’re going off? Is there an oppression statistic?
How can people even genuinely state who struggles less or more systematically? Like, especially when a lot of statistics say that a lot of us struggle disproportionately..
Are we going to be like “in many surveys it said people like you only experience violence 33%, we experience violence 33.1% of the time so you all basically don’t experience any violence at all”?
I mean, that is basically what a lot of this is in, except people aren’t going off fact, they’re going off their own social theories. Social theories which are usually like “these people are less oppressed because I say so”.
I want someone to actually come with the “objectively only/most suffering” factors they always speak of. I want points that aren’t just “I think you suffer less because I think you suffer less” coming from someone.
As you may know, all public schools in the entire state of West Virginia are closed due to a teachers strike. As you may not know, those teachers have a fund going to keep them up and running while the strike is ongoing. You can donate here to help support the fight, and hopefully help inspire others to follow and take back control of our own goddamn lives.
people still watch south park? where was that one really good post that basically decried everything wrong with the show and the creative process from like a year ago again?
