What Motivates Me?

Daily writing prompt

What motivates you?

I wish I could write an inspirational answer to this question, because it’s ripe for a motivation expert to make money from. Alas, I will not be inspirational, only honest.

I had a very productive summer on both the writing and the work fronts. I paced myself so that my work didn’t fall due at the last minute. From this, I learned what motivates me.

First, boredom motivates me. There’s only so much scrolling on the Internet I can stand without being bored. I don’t like being bored. I could have slept all that time, I suppose, because I don’t find sleep boring; however, day sleeping is not good for me. That left me with needing something to do, and work and writing helped.

Second, flow motivates me. I get flow from productive writing. Not so much from putting together classes; designing course sites and planning lessons doesn’t promote that seamless experience. I want to experience flow, so it’s motivating.

Third, blocking out time motivates me. I had whole days to waste all summer and work that I could do later. Instead, I told myself daily, “I will do three chapters first, then follow that up with writing time.” I put the less motivational classwork first. I scheduled everything in-between my intern visits (which broke up the monotony of having the same classwork daily).

There are some things, however, that I find so unmotivating that I avoid them. Housework is one of these things. I seem so overwhelmed trying to clean a cluttered house that I just break down. Our house is messy and cluttered as a result. Not dirty, just messy and cluttered. I think I will not be motivated for that until my husband and I decide to tackle the clutter together.

We can use the following professionally recommended strategies: 1) Break it down into smaller tasks; 2) Do the hardest stuff first; 3) Reward ourselves; 4) Quit if we’re not into the task after 15 minutes. That last part is the challenging one: I am never into housework. Is anyone?

I am obviously not a motivational expert, because I have not conquered my house. I hate the thought of the house taking away my precious writing time. So I hope my readers got something out of this anyhow.

A Rejection

I got a submission rejected yesterday. I knew I would, because it was a “first chapter” call, and I submitted my obviously genre fiction first chapter to an outfit likely looking for literary fiction. They let me down easy, of course.

Do I feel bad about it? Of course. I had fantasies about at least being longlisted, if not actually winning.

I’ve been rejected a lot. I suspect that much of the time, it’s because I have entered works into the realm of literary journals when I’m a genre writer; my stuff “doesn’t fit”. I’ve been told this. Much of the time, although I don’t like to admit it, my work probably doesn’t fit their quality standards either. I don’t know why I keep trying, except that one of my “doesn’t fit” stories got an honorable mention in a clearly literary contest.

I could take my rejections as not being “good enough”, or I could keep trying. I no longer query agents for my novels, instead choosing to self-publish. My reasons for this are less about rejections and more about the horror stories I’ve heard about traditional publishing these days. I go through periods of submitting on Submittable, and occasionally I get published. I’m not universally rejected, and nobody has begged me never to publish anything else again.

Rejections don’t spoil my flow time, nor do they destroy my inspirations. I do hope I get a major acceptance someday, because external validation is something I crave. But I’m still writing.

At the Risk of Sounding Repititous …

What do you enjoy most about writing?

My favorite thing about writing is getting totally absorbed in the process, a process called “flow”. I am a flow evangelist; I believe that everyone should find a flow activity. Flow contributes through well-being by engaging our brains in something outside ourselves.

Now that I got that out of the way, I will talk about other things I enjoy about writing. One of the biggest is watching my progress. When I was younger, I used a lot of adjectives, and my writing had a lot of “adjective noun, adjective noun” construction. This got a bit sing-songy. Now I write with just enough adjectives to get my point across, and not always paired with a noun directly. I used to use a lot of adverbs, with the same monotony of language. Now I use them sparingly and with more interesting nouns. I think this is an improvement; at least when I read my work over, it sounds better.

I enjoy watching my characters develop. It’s interesting how I have the bare idea of a character at the beginning, and once I start writing, their conversations flesh them out as a real character. I sometimes write conversations with them (which I call interrogations) to develop their characters and help me write.

But all of this comes back to the ability to sit and write, finding the words and going into an altered state where the words flow on the page and I lose track of time. It all goes back to flow.

Positive Emotions Then and Now

Daily writing prompt

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

View all responses

Fifteen years ago, I would have answered the question, “What positive emotion do you feel most often?” with elation. A perpetual high doesn’t make for a sustainable life, and in fact, I wavered between elation and despair (often in the same day). This was life with untreated bipolar disorder, fast cycling version.

Maybe because of the medication, and maybe because of getting older, my most common positive emotion is contentment. When I was younger, I thought of contentment as something inferior, as a curse that the fairy who didn’t get invited to the christening would cast on the poor baby^*.

Now I prefer contentment. It’s nice to not have to feel the extremes all the time. I do not get exhausted with my contentment as I did with my elation. The opposite of contentment on the spectrum is discontent, which is not a crippling feeling like despair.

I would not trade contentment for the overdose of elation ever again. I like small doses of elation, but I treasure the anchor of calm, peaceful emotion that is contentment.

^* This is a common trope in Western fairy tales in which a family presents a royal baby to the court at large in a christening (baptism) ceremony. The family invites all the witches/fairies/aunts save one. The uninvited one shows up anyhow and curses the baby. Sometimes the curse seems innocuous but causes a lot of harm, at times hilarious, to the child (for example, the child who could not tell a lie).

How Do I Plan? How Do You Plan?

Daily writing prompt

How do you plan your goals?

View all responses

I teach this topic in my resource management class. So when someone asks “How”, I’m going to have a complex and textbook answer.

The way people in general plan goals is to:

Derive a goal from their values
Clarify the goal (in terms of who, what, where, how, when, etc.)
Assess the resources needed (and whether they’re enough)
Make an auxiliary plan of where to get more resources (sometimes)
Develop standards (in terms of what success looks like)
Set a sequence of actions to guide the actions needed to carry out the implementation of the goal.

Do people really follow these steps? Unless we do everything without thinking, we do. The more complex and important the goal, the more obviously it looks like this. But these steps are more or less happening even if the goal is fixing a quick dinner. Think of following a recipe; the steps in the recipe follow this pattern. The person lays out standards — I need to add these ingredients in the right types and amounts. I have to follow a specific sequence of combining them — there’s my sequence of actions.

Plans at the spur of the moment may go through these steps quickly — think of deciding on the fly to go out to eat at a restaurant you’re passing by. You look at the menu costs; you check your pocket. Then you go in, knowing that the wait person will ask you if you want something to drink as they hand you a menu, then you will look over the menu and decide what you want, then you will tell the waitress. Standards and sequences.

Look at the step where resources are assessed. Not everyone looks at finding the resources if they don’t have them ready. Only people who are comfortable with change do that because it creates a new goal they perhaps haven’t counted on. People who are not comfortable with change stick with the goals they’ve always set, which we could call maintenance goals because they maintain a current way of life.

This is not the answer the prompt asked for. I was supposed to write how I personally set goals. But it answers the question. Other than this, what do you need to know?

It’s a Weird Thing

What brings you peace?

I have a certain amount of anxiety that keeps me from getting peace. It particularly manifests itself when I’m in a car or when I lose something or my boss calls me to a meeting. It’s worse than it used to be because of a medication change.

I often pray to induce a sense of peace. The weird thing is that I consider myself at best nominally Christian. I don’t specify what God I’m praying to. I don’t believe in Hell or Heaven, I think intercessary prayer is actually confirmation bias; yet I pray to find the object or not get into a car accident. Yes, that makes me a hypocrite.

Or does it? As I said, I know if that item is not in the house, praying doesn’t bring it back there. It also doesn’t change the laws of physics. But it calms me down. It has a beneficial effect, even if only temporarily.

Every now and then I throw a “thank you” in God’s direction as well. But the good Christians do not believe I am a good Christian and I’m okay with that. Praying brings me peace when I’m in a panic.

The Shop I Would Open

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

I have always had the desire to open a cafe. I would serve coffee and coffee drinks, pastries, and a light lunch like sandwiches and soup (I am in the US, so this is what people would ask for.)

In a cafe, one sells more than coffee or food. One sells atmosphere, coffee culture, thirdspace. One provides a place where people meet and find community. I would make sure I provided a welcoming atmosphere, from seating to decor to staff.

My idea is creativity and comfort. Two opposing tensions, but a dynamic mix. I hope to have different modes of coffee making available, and maybe even coffee flights for the curious. But there’s also a coffee of the day or an Americano.

In a perfect world, I would have the capital to put into this, and it would be my retirement job. I don’t. But I can dream, can’t I?

The Most Important Thing I Carry

Daily writing prompt

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

View all responses

NOTE: This answer is coming from someone from a highly technological culture.

I considered at first answering this question metaphorically, with something like “your attitude”, but dismissed that as coy. I decided I would answer this prosaically, with the one item I never leave the house without — my smartphone.

Smartphones have become so ubiquitous that grammar guides have shortened the name to just “phones” as if landline phones no longer exist. As a typical member of Generation Jones, I was a relative latecomer to the cutting the cord and ditching the landline. Today, one’s smartphone is just “the phone”.

A smartphone is necessary for quick action during emergencies, and a way to share last words in a shooter situation. It serves as a resource during travel, to find food and lodging in the middle of a road trip. I was in a van for a long ride home this week when our engine had trouble. We located a town with a repair service near us in minutes and a hotel down the road that night when our plans changed. What a change from drifting through towns looking for service.

A smartphone also answers questions with a rapidity not seen in the reference library days. There is still a purpose to reference libraries, who filter out questionable sources (scams, lies, slanted coverage) as a matter of course. But to someone trained to judge information, the Internet is a speedy source of information to answer questions like “What bird did I just see?” or “Who won the World Series in 2016?” (for the latter, it was the Chicago Cubs.) The smartphone is a tiny but mighty Internet portal.

I haven’t addressed the use of a smartphone to access music or books. With a subscription, one has access to whole eras of music. Whether a private library on Kindle or a public one on Libby, one has access to an entire library. That alone may be enough for me to keep my phone handy.

If I left my keys at home, I wouldn’t be able to drive. If I left my smartphone at home, I would be stranded in an info stream without a boat.

My Blog and Small Changes

Daily writing prompt

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?

View all responses

I don’t expect my blog to change the world. It’s not that kind of blog. I don’t discuss politics or movements in health, relationships, or social issues. I do occasionally post on those, but from a very personal viewpoint.

What slight changes can my blog make? I have two in mind. The first is that I am, unashamedly, a flow evangelist. I talk about the difference a flow activity makes in people’s lives. Flow is a stage of mind where an activity absorbs all one’s consciousness, at optimal levels of competency and challenge. Time flies by when doing the activity. I get my flow from writing, and is a major reason I continue to write. I want everyone to find their flow activities, because they contribute to happiness through engagement, the E in the PERMA model of happiness.

The other change I think my blog fosters is to demystify writing and writers. Many people don’t think they can write, or write and don’t think they deserve to be called a writer. I share my struggles with writer’s block, impostor syndrome, and marketing my books. I also talk about the challenges of scheduling time around a busy and shifting schedule. Every time I write, I hope writers and would-be writers find some of my joy contagious and my struggles identifiable.

My blog is not earth-shaking. But I hope it provides a day in the life of a relatable writer.

Writing as a Habit

Describe one habit that brings you joy.

I try to write, or at least do something that pertains to writing, every day. Writing, like any flow activity, gives me joy.

I love playing with words, finding the right words, using my skills to eliminate extraneous words. I love using special words, exact words. Creating worlds, making characters realistic, building conversations — all of these are parts of writing.

Sometimes it’s challenging to build in writing time. In the summer, where I have responsibilities but freedom in scheduling them, I have written daily after my daily “day job” tasks. So after I have worked on my new class for the day, and after grading for my internship class, I have time to write. This fall (which starts in a couple of weeks for me), I will not have that early afternoon time. So most days, I can write after work; other times it will have to be early evening. But it’s important that I write, because I need a little joy every day.