If You Can’t Get Started: An Encouraging Words Episode

EPISODE 233I

Since it's barely past the beginning of the year, I figure some people are having challenges in getting back into their writing on a regular basis. I know I've had some challenges trying to get my head out of vacation mode! So I came up with some ideas that might help you. I took my own advice and got a little more writing done this week! I hope you do too!

TRANSCRIPTION

[00:00:01.370]

Welcome to Write Now Workshop Podcast, where you can write a book and change the world, I'm your host, Kitty Bucholtz, and this is episode 233, "If You Can't Get Started," an Encouraging Words episode coming to you on Sunday, February 7th, 2021. Some days start out great and end great. And they were pretty freaking good all the way through. And those are the best days. My experience is not that those are the most common days though.

[00:00:32.240]

There's often something that's just like, oh, I forgot that I had to do this thing, or crap, I didn't know I had to do this thing, or I did this thing and it didn't work and now it's broken and now I have to fix it. Or, like, there's lots of things, at least in my days, where I'm just like, seriously, seriously. I just wanted a day, I just wanted one day where everything is going really smoothly.

[00:00:57.560]

And when I get one of those days, I'm like, this is the best! But I'm spoiled, and then I want more and I get irritated when I have days where it isn't, you know, kind of tulips and roses and unicorns all the way through.

[00:01:12.470]

Okay, but on days like that, like, am I doing a lot of writing? The thing is, is that the days that I'm having the perfect day and the days that I'm having kind of crap days, I'm not necessarily getting a significantly different number of words down. So what are we doing? Like, what's happening in our brains? I can't really comment on the brains thing right this second, because that is not any research that I did on this particular topic.

[00:01:38.660]

But you know how some days start out difficult and then they get better. And thank goodness, that's always a good thing. I'm not sure, I think for me it's harder when the day starts out really well and then it gets difficult and stays difficult until I go to bed. And then all I can think about is, please let this day be over and I can go to sleep and forget about it and wake up and it'll be a new day. That actually happened to me yesterday.

[00:01:59.660]

I don't know. It was just a very not awesome day. Wasn't a crap day, but it was worse than "meh." And, you know, sometimes it's just hard to to get writing. And sometimes it's like a whole long time, a whole lot of things that happened in a row.

[00:02:19.790]

And, you know, all of us can very quickly come up with a whole bunch of things where we're like, yeah, like this or this or this. So what do we do when we just need to kind of force ourselves back into writing without necessarily using the word "force?" So I'm always trying to think of a way to ease myself back in in a way that makes me cheerful and happy again and just excited and wanting to do it. So how do I get that excitement going?

[00:02:46.760]

Sometimes, sometimes it's just a matter of showing up. Some people say once you sit down and put your fingers on the keyboard and your document is open in front of you, like that's 90 percent of the battle. So butt in chair. Sometimes you can't even get that far. So what do you do? Well, in my Sydney writers group, so I have writer friends all around the world because I've moved so many times. And in my Sydney writers group, one of my friends was just like, I'm not getting anything accomplished and I just, I got nothing. I can't even get myself to want to do more. And so we were like, OK, you know what? Just show up to the accountability call. Like, don't have a plan for anything that you'll...