How I motivate myself to write
I liked this article as a collection of tips for effective writing, but did not find much about the topic of motivation within it. The author appears to be internally driven to write from the outset, and the advice given assumes that you also have the volition to write yourself and want to improve.<p>Is lack of interest a solvable problem? This is a question I continually revisit. In one of the comment threads for the last &quot;how to write&quot; article that was submitted recently, there was an opinion that it is not. There is nothing you can do to motivate someone who is fundamentally a non-writer to be a writer. The interest will never be there, no matter what the person chooses to say or think on the contrary.<p>Does the concept of interest have some kind of divide between &quot;mental&quot; (the subjects your brain is capable of focusing on at a biological level) and &quot;volitional&quot; (the things you say you want to focus on)? Certain mental conditions include symptoms like &quot;specific interests&quot; as diagnostic criteria, which makes me believe that biology plays a part in motivation in addition to routine.<p>Ideas such as those have made me question many other things. Assuming that lack of motivation is not solvable, is it justifiable to have interest in nothing (productive&#x2F;creative&#x2F;cultural) in particular, yet still be dissatisfied with the ways you spend your time?<p>There is some kind of cognitive dissonance that arises when I think that &quot;writing would be nice,&quot; when attempting to write is an activity that I lose interest in within days of actively returning to it, but the original thought of &quot;writing would be nice&quot; <i>never goes away</i>.