What steals your Mojo?

[mightyutuvan]

What steals your Mojo and what do you do about it?  (I define Mojo as the enthusiasm and motivation to write)

For me there are 2 main Mojo Bandits:

1.  Insecurity.  All those little voices that insist that I am laying down bland, boring drivel and calling it a story or chapter.  They whisper things like "You actually think you are creative?".  I've gotten better at resisting this particular thief by viewing my novel as a marathon.  Right now it doesn't matter how good it is keep writing until you get to the end.

2.  Oddly enough, writing and publishing advice.  While some of it helps (Jim's Blog, Stephen J. Cannell's lecture on screen-writing, and writing excuses podcast) much of makes me feel overwhelmed.  Too much to accomplish with too little talent.  How can I keep all that in mind when I am writing?  Getting published sounds nigh impossible.  I try and recognize this negative influence and limit my reading to select items.  As far as taking advice seriously I mainly use 2 criteria to strain through the sources (1) Are they published professionally (2) do I like their writing.  I also remind myself that I am not trying to write literature, just tell a story I would like to read.

[Fox]

You mean besides Dr. Evil (or I guess Fat Bastard)?   



Probably the fear that anything I write will be too derivative of things I've read or seen etc.

[mightyutuvan]

You mean besides Dr. Evil (or I guess Fat Bastard)?   

Strangely enough it worked out so that once I traveled back in time and teamed up with my future self I realized that I had never... wait, was that Austin from ten minutes ago or Austin ten minutes from now?  Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed!

[Starbeam]

For me, it's not so much that the inspiration and motivation get stolen as much as I let it lapse.  I get overinvolved in other stuff, like research and reading, and as much as I want to write to remove the words bouncing crazily in my head, I start having trouble with making myself pick up my pen.  Sometimes I get stuck on a name or description, and I have trouble getting past it.

I learned a long time ago not to bother with how to books.  I keep a copy of Stephen King's On Writing, and a printout of Jim's blog.  I've found most of the other books are pretty useless for me because they get bogged down in all the grammar and literary terms, and they tend to repeat the same things.  I don't bother with figuring out themes, symbolism, exposition, etc.  I just write and leave that to worry about later.  Plus I write speculative fiction, and I tend to need more category specific type things for that.  Like with Orson Scott Card's book that has sections on FTL travel and world building.

If I get the mindset of "I'll never be this good" when reading books, I look at the book I'm reading, and it tends to be something like LotR, and remind myself that pretty much nobody will ever match that.  And then go find a book that's pretty badly written and read it, and tell myself that if that can be published, I have a chance.

[Mickey Finn]

Work. I have to get creative with problem solving, and it taxes my brain.

Taxes, I saw.

[Starbeam]

Work. I have to get creative with problem solving, and it taxes my brain.

Taxes, I saw.

Yeah, that's my other problem.  Work.  And life in general.  It keeps intruding.

[Quantus]

well, 1) it takes me a bit to get the mojo flowing, so I have to really sit down and devote time to the project, get in the mindset and all that.  Its not so much something I can just do for an hour after work.  2) I get stuck on the details too much.  Spending all my time in research and back story and ensuring that I have the details of the world in place that I forget to actually get to the story.  I dont know how many settings i have with no central story to tell in them.  I always seem to wnat to get it perfect on the first pass, and so I get stuck in preparation and never get to the actual writing (theres a proverb and a life lesson in there somewhere)   3) Im a horrible note taker, so most of my works are still locked in my brain, without so much as an actual existing outline for me to reference. 

Getting past 2 and 3 will go along way to alleviating 1, but so far Ive had little luck.  I really need to just stfu and just start writing until page one becomes page two.

[Kali]

Telling someone about the story, the plot.  Or outlining it.  Once I have, in any form, told the story I lose all interest in writing it.  It's told, it's out of me, I'm done. 

I can share the stuff I've already got down, but if I talk about where I want it to go, it's over.  I won't feel like writing it anymore.

[Starbeam]

2) I get stuck on the details too much.  Spending all my time in research and back story and ensuring that I have the details of the world in place that I forget to actually get to the story.  I dont know how many settings i have with no central story to tell in them.  I always seem to wnat to get it perfect on the first pass, and so I get stuck in preparation and never get to the actual writing (theres a proverb and a life lesson in there somewhere)   3) Im a horrible note taker, so most of my works are still locked in my brain, without so much as an actual existing outline for me to reference. 

Getting past 2 and 3 will go along way to alleviating 1, but so far Ive had little luck.  I really need to just stfu and just start writing until page one becomes page two.

What works for me with this is to just write and not worry about worldbuilding until I get about 20-30 pages in and things start to sound like drivel. Then I do the world building and get more of an idea of where the story is going and then go from there.

Telling someone about the story, the plot.  Or outlining it.  Once I have, in any form, told the story I lose all interest in writing it.  It's told, it's out of me, I'm done. 

I can share the stuff I've already got down, but if I talk about where I want it to go, it's over.  I won't feel like writing it anymore.

I have this.  Any clue how to explain it to someone who doesn't?  My b/f thinks I'm going to lose ideas because I don't write them down soon as I have them, and even when he's seen this problem, says the same thing.

[mightyutuvan]

I try to explain it as my story has an energy that is used in the writing of it and talking about it steals that energy.  I just quit talking about it.  "I am on chapter ##" is pretty much all I will share.

[Kali]

I have this.  Any clue how to explain it to someone who doesn't?  My b/f thinks I'm going to lose ideas because I don't write them down soon as I have them, and even when he's seen this problem, says the same thing.

I usually tell people almost exactly what I wrote above.  If I tell the story in any form, even to tell someone what it's going to be about, I lose the desire to write it because now I've told the story.  Having told it once, I lose the need to tell it in another form.

[LizW65]

For me, it's getting caught up in "real life" stuff and telling myself "I can always do that later."  I find the longer I stay away, the harder it is to get back into it--and I'm also easily distracted.  Now that I'm committed to one mauscript for NaNoWriMo, I'm finding myself more interested in another idea that's been kicking around my brain for some time--basically, it's "Martin Chuzzlewit in the 21st Century meets Bruce Campbell", and I find myself concentrating on that instead of on what I'm supposed to be writing.

[Sully]

You mean besides Dr. Evil (or I guess Fat Bastard)?   



Probably the fear that anything I write will be too derivative of things I've read or seen etc.

I first read that as 'Arrogant Bastard' and was going to tell you to stop drinking.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Unexpected bad news can take out my ability to write for a bit.

Being disrupted in my prep for writing definitely can, particularly in terms of having to unexpecetdly do People Stuff.

i certainly had no energy at all for my usual writing on Friday or indeed my usual backup of writing on Saturday this past weekend because of two extremely full days at a work colloquium.  (Lots of great cutting-edge science stuff, it just used a lot of energy.)