The oh-so-elusive desire to write
What do you do when you feel like you've lost the motivation to write? Not because you have writer's block necessarily - but just that fundamental desire to put pen to paper, or fingers to keys?
How do you rekindle your desire to write?
This is a really hard question and it comes with two different, maybe polar opposite answers. The first one would be, when talking about the fundamental desire to write, the itch in my fingers and in my brain to come up with something new, to make thoughts into words and into reality, I somehow always have it. I'll be dozing off while watching a physics class and suddenly I feel like I need to write something, anything, because of what a friend has told me or whatever, and I immediately get pen and paper to write. I don't really remember a time when this desire wasn't there, although it's usually pretty mellow and it doesn't go past the desire stage, specially when I'm stressed out (which happens to be now). On the other hand, there is the desire of having something concrete written and that on is something I've wanted to rekindle for a while now. To try to do something to it, I usually sleep. I go by on very little sleep and that somehow affects the way I feel about things in the sense that I don't get motivated whenever I'm tired, which seems to be almost always lately. Besides, when I rest my body, my mind somehow wakes up and works double time, sparking up my desire to write and it inspires me to write. It's not working like this anymore, so I tend to force myself to write, picking up 100 letters prompts (that I hardly ever publish because, you know, they feel forced and so on) and reading lots of books, reviews on books, magazine articles, newspapers and so on. I tend to read whenever I want to write. And slowly, the motivation to put thoughts into words comes back, together with a heightened idea of the mechanics of such action, even though they aren't that much helpful.
Basically, I take time for myself, usually during the weekend, to de-stress and read and immerse myself in the words and that is a pretty efficient method of surviving writer's block or lack of motivation.
How do you rekindle your desire to write?
This is a really hard question and it comes with two different, maybe polar opposite answers. The first one would be, when talking about the fundamental desire to write, the itch in my fingers and in my brain to come up with something new, to make thoughts into words and into reality, I somehow always have it. I'll be dozing off while watching a physics class and suddenly I feel like I need to write something, anything, because of what a friend has told me or whatever, and I immediately get pen and paper to write. I don't really remember a time when this desire wasn't there, although it's usually pretty mellow and it doesn't go past the desire stage, specially when I'm stressed out (which happens to be now). On the other hand, there is the desire of having something concrete written and that on is something I've wanted to rekindle for a while now. To try to do something to it, I usually sleep. I go by on very little sleep and that somehow affects the way I feel about things in the sense that I don't get motivated whenever I'm tired, which seems to be almost always lately. Besides, when I rest my body, my mind somehow wakes up and works double time, sparking up my desire to write and it inspires me to write. It's not working like this anymore, so I tend to force myself to write, picking up 100 letters prompts (that I hardly ever publish because, you know, they feel forced and so on) and reading lots of books, reviews on books, magazine articles, newspapers and so on. I tend to read whenever I want to write. And slowly, the motivation to put thoughts into words comes back, together with a heightened idea of the mechanics of such action, even though they aren't that much helpful.
Basically, I take time for myself, usually during the weekend, to de-stress and read and immerse myself in the words and that is a pretty efficient method of surviving writer's block or lack of motivation.