Not motivated?

Added!

Honestly? Motivation is like the spark that gets you started. Discipline is the flame that keeps you going.

This is going to be long and it's going to sound like I'm derailing at first, but please bear with me. Writing fanfic is one of my hobbies. And I used to think I needed to sit around and wait for inspiration/motivation. Otherwise, writing wasn't going to happen. And then I realized something: when I was majoring in English Lit in university, we had to churn out papers of 10-25 pages as part of the work, often 1-5 per course. Hand it in late without prior professorial approval and get docked half a letter grade. So, 1 day late and the highest mark you could get was an A-, 2days was a B+, etc. And somehow, even if I didn't think I understood the material, even in I hated the piece of literature I was supposed to be analyzing, even if I thought the essay topics were dull... writing happened. Neither I nor anybody I know ever asked for an extension because...

"I wasn't inspired."
"My muse died"
"I had writers' block"

It had to be done, so it got done. Maybe it wasn't perfect or as good as it could have been, but it was there.

And I realized that when I needed to push myself, motivation had nothing to do with it. (I mean, yes, you can say that "good grades" motivated me, the same way that, now that I want to lose weight, "being fit" motivates me, but again that's some nebulous goal in the (not as distant as it once was but not so close as I'd like) future. For the day-to-day logistics, it wasn't motivation that moved me. It was the conviction that like it or not, it needed to be done. So... with that in mind, could I set myself a writing deadline and stick to it 99.999 percent of the time? (Stuff happens 0.001% of the time. Even in the term paper example, extensions were possible. Just not all that easy to come by.) I decided to write a scene a night, with an optional day off if I finished a chapter and a planned 2-week vacation when I go out of town every year.

I have not had writers' block in going on 8 years. Not to say I haven't had scenes I wasn't sure how to approach or scenes I really didn't want to write because I knew I'd have to show them to a subject matter expert who was going to shred them and make me spend more time than usual rewriting/polishing. But staring at a blank page and thinking to myself, "I'm stuck. I have no idea what comes next"? No. And I rarely take a break, even when I post a chapter. Sometimes, I do write on vacation; it depends. Not because I have to. Because I feel like my day isn't complete unless it's done.

When I decided to lose weight and add exercise, I used those same "discipline muscles". I'm going to stick to my planned exercise routine, barring serious pain/illness/medical orders. Whether I actually feel like doing it? Irrelevant. Not to say I don't change up my routine if I think I'm in a rut. And I take 2 days off a week from strength training. My cardio is walking and I can handle 2 hours a day of that, every day, without feeling like I'm overdoing. When I trained for a 5K, 3 days a week of running was plenty, but I still walked the other four (and frequently did some walking on run days too).

Sometimes I'm all gung ho about it. Sometimes, I just want to get it done and over with for the day. But I do it, because I know what it does for me and I know it's working and it doesn't matter in the least whether I want to do it today. It's getting done.