How to Write When You Don’t Feel Like It: (Hint: Trick Yourself into Feeling Like It.)

I stumbled into August, and one week turned into almost three. Oops!

But I made a promise, and I’m back to deliver. In my last post, I wrote about how to be inspired. In it, I shared from my travels to the last home that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived in as a family with their daughter Frances. It’s an actual bed and breakfast, and it’s a museum.

I love quirky places that try to be too much. In fact, I think this is something we all do from time to time as writers. We try to write too much. Too much emotion, too much dialogue, too much in a scene that doesn’t really add to its emotive qualities.

But what do we do when “too much” isn’t the problem? How do we write when we just don’t feel like it? When there’s too little going on in our brains?

My big piece of advice is to trick myself into feeling like it. Part of this comes from inspiration (like my trip), and part of this trick comes from just sitting at the computer and spending time with my thoughts. In order to write, we have to think about why we’re writing in the first place.

Just like an Olympic hopeful doesn’t always want to practice, he presses on when he doesn’t feel like it because he thinks about why he started in the first place — he loved the sport and had a goal to make it to the world’s stage.

1) Spend time thinking about why you’re writing in the first place. There are tons of goal worksheets on the internet that can help you discover your “why.” They are so prevalent because they are a crucial first step to achieving any goal, writing-related or not.

2) Trick yourself into writing by taking the time to become re-inspired. (Hello, trip to Montgomery and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum.)

3) Learn what your characters (or if nonfiction, your readers) want. When you can’t seem to want to write, switch gears and learn instead.

This is a tip I’ve gathered from years of teaching my own kids at home. When they don’t want to do schoolwork, guess what we do? We don’t. (Well, it’s kind of sneaky, but we actually do because we just skip the part they don’t want to do and start with what they enjoy.)

When my children groan and moan about finishing work from the day before or continuing a math concept they’re struggling to get, I will often read to them from a novel series we’re reading or show them an educational video about something related to their school work. (Okay, so maybe the virtual gem exhibit at our local science museum does not relate to bar models. But it’s still learning, and once someone is engaged in the act of learning, he or she is much more prone to learn things that he or she once balked at learning.)

So if you can’t seem to write from your characters’ or your reader’s point of view, think about what those people want. Does your reader want clarity? Does she need confidence in her identity? Do your characters need to find the treasure map that will lead them to the discovery of all time?

4) Once you’ve figured out what your readers and/or characters want, do some research. How could they get that confidence or that clarity? What is it that prevents them from seeing themselves through an authentic lens? How can you serve your readers and provide them the clarity and confidence they’re lacking? For fiction writers: What does the rainforest actually look like where your characters will end up finding their treasure map? Research the plants that grow there and the animals that call it home.

Research has a way of sparking intrigue in us, and that sense of curiosity will most often lead to the desire to write.

5) Start somewhere. You’ve dug into the research, figured out your characters’ needs or your reader’s wants, you’ve met with inspiration and now, you cannot put it off. It is time to write.

Maybe you don’t have the perfect idea of where to go next. That is okay; just start somewhere. As you write words on the page, they don’t have to be “keeper” words. They just have to fill the blank space for now. You can always go back and delete them later. The key here is to complete the action of writing because the more we do an action, the more it becomes part of us.

The more we run, the more we see ourselves as runners.

The more we write, the more we see ourselves as writers.

Today, I will leave you with a quote and some photos from the interior of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum. The quote is from author/editor Mary Kole about why we write fictional worlds for fictional characters: “We are going through their story because we want to know what the story is, sure, but because we also want to know how that story affects them … This is what readers will attach to.”

I hope you see the museum and interior of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Suite, and you’re able to attach to it and find a reason to write.

A little cheesy, but it is the F. Scott Suite.

A letter in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwriting.

This is the chair I sat in while revising and re-thinking the setting of my novel in July.

A picture of Zelda and daughter Frances on vacation.

The museum is full of little-known information about the Fitzgeralds’ relationships with other authors, editors, publishers, and with each other. There are also magazine covers from that time period depicting what was happening in the world while F. Scott and Zelda were busy writing.

In the entrance to the museum (which is on the bottom floor of the bed and breakfast), you are greeted by its history.

One of the most-known phrases from The Great Gatsby is explained in this magazine article where Zelda is quoted. It also reveals a peek into a different time with different mindsets and visions for what women could and could not be.

The Great Gatsby was actually not the best-selling third follow-up to his first runaway hit, This Side of Paradise. What many people don’t realize is that until the book was widely distributed among the Armed Forces, it did not run away with sales. Of course, by the time it was published and had grown in popularity, Fitzgerald was already very wealthy due in large part to the short stories he wrote.

He only published four finished novels in his lifetime because he made so much money from short stories, it was just the more lucrative way to spend his time. He and Zelda certainly lived a life built on wealth and prestige and mingling in certain circles. So it makes sense that he chose to do what was financially more advantageous. But many of the characters in his novels came from this social elitist lifestyle, so it seems that Fitzgerald did what writers are often told to do: “Write what you know.”