Main Motivators
I wish I knew what compelled me to keep doing this. There’s going to be a need to replicate it outside of August, and I don’t know what it will be that keeps me coming back.
It seems a bit spammy to post nonsense here daily, but I can also tell that without making it an almost-daily habit I could probably lose track of time and go another 6 months without posting anything. That 6 months would be perfectly fine without me writing here, but I’d be annoyed at myself because I paid money for this website and then I just let it sit here, unused? How wasteful! How terrible! I’d also be annoyed because I’m almost never regretful that I took the time to sit and write, even if it’s only 100 words. But, I’m always disappointed in myself when I actively choose not to make the time for it. (Anyone sensing a theme for my overall Blaugust 2023 posts?)
It’s entirely unoriginal, but I probably get the most motivation to try something from watching how someone else does it. It’s probably why National Novel Writing Month has always been so appealing to me. 30 days, writing 50,000 words in a mad dash? It’s total insanity, but look how many people attempt it, and are somehow successful! It doesn’t result in a published book, but the thing for me, for a long time was just that I had taken the time, put in the effort, and proven that I could somehow string a bunch of sentences together into a story. The downfall (and the thing that always torpedoed things for me after November) was running myself ragged inevitably left me burned out and in need of a break. Ideally, I’d emerge from NaNoWriMo with an established writing habit, and continue through the rest of the year and all of the next with an innate ability to write over 1500 words a day, huzzah!
That’s never how it works.
In a way, November is both the worst and the best time to have the NaNo exercise, because for most of us in the US, there’s a built-in 4-day weekend towards the end of the month to make that final push if we’re running behind. But then December comes and do I have the time to hang up lights and decorate a tree, bake cookies, knit presents, shop for what I can’t knit, engage with all of the holiday festivities and still write every day? It’s the ultimate test of my willpower, and I fail at it, every time. And I tell myself, I’ll pick up the routine in January, a very useful resolution for the new year (because those always go so well for me). But by that point, the sun has barely been out for a month, and if my vitamin routine has been disrupted the way everything else has I’m probably so deficient in Vitamin D that it’s another mark against me. Plus, I’m usually just generally exhausted from spending the last week and a half of the month running around in the middle of snowstorms on the daily. So, anything I write in January feels like the worst thing I’ve ever written and concrete evidence of my inability to do anything correctly (because I catastrophize like a PRO!).
It’s a lot. And its a whole lot of nonsense. The nice thing about Blaugust appears to be that you write what you write, because it’s the exercise of writing. Which is a lot like NaNoWriMo, except that there’s a chance more people will see it than if I wrote a story where the climax probably included something like “[they all do magicy things here, and win the day],” because sometimes you just can’t be bothered to craft the intricate plot points necessary to flesh out overcoming that final obstacle in the heat of the moment.
Blog posts don’t really work that way. If you have something you’re going to put brackets around to fix later, then the post isn’t “ready” to go up, and you’ve got to fix it first. Although, there’s probably an argument to be made that you just lay it all bare to someone and say “[I have a many thoughts about this thing, and it’s going to be a subject all its own someday].”
As it gets towards the end of the month, I’m strategizing about how to maintain some of the momentum I’ve built here. Maybe it will be looking at my energy throughout the week and focusing on those days as writing days, so I actually start scheduling posts to come out at a time human eyes will see them. Or, maybe I’ll keep poking at this place everyday to try to ingrain the habit I’m trying to build. Providing myself some alliterative framework to fall back on if I’ve got nothing else to write about is my go-to strategy for the moment. I’m not sure how long I can maintain that before I get tired of it though. I also have a document I’m using to hold some ideas of where to go next. I’m wary of planning though, because my penchant for black and white thinking tends to lead to me scrapping things completely if they don’t go exactly as I intended.
So far, I think motivation for me has just meant trying, because sometimes that’s all I can do.
