How To Stay in the Desk Chair Saddle

I spent years trying to figure out how to keep my butt in my chair and my hands on the keys (also known as BICHOK). Somehow I finally stumbled on the secret—at least for me. If there's a rule in this crazy writing business, it's that nothing works for everybody. This thing I figured out, it wasn't about tricks and self-discipline. What it is about is motivation—and to get myself motivated I had to do some serious self-searching. It wasn't easy, but it worked for me.

The basis of this self-searching toward motivation starts with some questions:

1. For you, is writing a hobby, a part-time job, a career, something else entirely?

2. Looking at your answer to the above, decide how much time, money, effort you are willing/able to put into writing to make it what you want it to be.

3. Depending on your answer to the above, decide what you want to achieve over the next few weeks, months, years. Set a goal that seems reasonable to you, then add more time to that to leave room for things taking longer than you think they will, and for the inevitable delays.

These questions and answers will change over time, so be sure to reevaluate frequently. Now you know if what you're currently doing is too little—or too much—time, money, effort to get you where you want to be.
Now you have what you need for self-motivation. Look at your goals and what you need to do to reach them. Each day you can evaluate how you're doing and if you need to maybe get your BICHOK going. It's much easier to get yourself going if you have a clear goal of what you want to achieve and the time frame in which you want to achieve it.

Have a happy and successful holiday week!
Cheryel
www.cheryelhutton.com

The Hard Makes it Great

I live in an unpredictable, chaotic world. I have a non-fiction career at GeekMom.com, a fiction career that has resulted in six books with contracts for three more as yet unpublished, and I have a life as a mom of four kids, including one on the autism spectrum and one with a variety of mental challenges that defy easy explanation.

On any given day, an emergency with one of my kids can happen, usually meltdowns at school that require instant attention. I can't commit to a solid schedule or even look for an outside job--I'd have to miss too much time or leave at the drop of a hat.

All of which isn't complaining. I love my kids, I love all the writing I do.  But every now and then, people who are aware of my daily life say "how do you do all this?"

I don't really know how I manage to scrounge time every day to write fiction. My methods vary from day to day, to handwritten chapters to daydreaming to getting up early/staying up late.

But I don't think that's the real question people are asking. I think what they really want to know is "how do you motivate yourself to find the writing time?"

Writers have all kinds of organizations available to provide motivation. We're in the midst of one right now with National Novel Writing Month. The Romance Writers of America chapters offer courses and workshops on motivation and creativity. And that's just scratching the surface.

I'd write without any of that. Because the answer to the question of "how do you motivate yourself to find the writing time?" is that I want it that bad, no matter how hard it gets.

Motivations and support can keep a writer going during challenging times but the want and need to create has to eventually come from within.

I'm not sure where my inner motivation comes from. I know from the time I was little, I made up stories, either on paper or in my head. My first work of any length was at age 14 and it was a mosh-up of John Christopher's Tripod series with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Elvish lords in exiles saved someone fleeing slavery from aliens. Yes, even then, I was tossing a whole bunch of genres in a blender and hitting "stir." If the internet had existed back then, I would have written reams and reams of (probably very bad) fanfiction.

Along with my love of stories came a drive to finish. Partially because I love writing stories too much to abandon one and partly because of my emotional background. I lost my dad when I was young and that left me with a sense that life is short. I don't want to leave things to some later date because I might not be around at that later date.

There's a sense in the back of my mind that there's just no time. So I squeeze everything I can out of what I have.

How does all this help you to write? I'm not sure but I'm guessing each and every storyteller out there has a desire, sometimes hidden, to get that story told.

Listen to that voice that whispers and nurture it until it shouts and screams at you to keep writing.

And that's hard. But, remember, the hard is what makes it great.

Corrina Lawson's book can be found at www.corrina-lawson.com, and you can usually find her wandering about her house, notebook in hand or daydreaming about the next story.