The Scribbling Novelist: Motivation

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Motivation

I'm seriously wondering if I'm depressed or something. I have a new idea, but no motivation to start working on that new idea. No motivation to work on old ideas. No motivation to sit and think of new ideas. No motivation at all.

I have turned to Chick-fil-A mints for comfort. I only brought two (of the two dozen I stole last night) with me to work. I just realized that there are little quotes on the back of the wrappers. I suppose I've been gobbling them down too fast to see the fine details.

First mint quote: "No goal is too high if you climb with care and confidence." (S. Truett Cathy)

Second mint quote: "Courtesy is cheap to provide, and it pays great dividends." (S. Truett Cathy)

Two quotes by this Cathy fellow. I suppose I should have realized that the guy founded the restaurant, but I had to Google him learn that.

5 comments:

margosita said...: It could be plenty of other things besides depression. Summer laziness, maybe. Or the anticipation of moving and starting a new thing in a new play with new people. A lot of your energy is going other places. Don't worry. Soon you won't have a CHOICE and you'll write whether you feel motivated or not. ;); July 3, 2008 at 6:54 PM
angie said...: Ha ha.... I knew you were a klepto. Mints and ketchup!! What else do you help yourself to?

I don't know much about writing and what all goes into that, but I do know that you just got done writing a fantastic book a few weeks ago. Cut yourself some slack. It will come. I think you need a girls day to pull you out of all of this.

Signed: Fellow Slacker; July 3, 2008 at 10:21 PM
Tanya said...: Thanks ladies!

I think I've come to the conclusion that I just need a little bit of a break and that IS okay. :) Maybe now I can get some more reading done, who knows.

:)T; July 4, 2008 at 12:11 PM
Unknown said...: Wow. That kind of makes me want to open a restaurant just so I can quote myself on all of the free mints I give out.; July 4, 2008 at 5:56 PM
Unknown said...: oh and the past 72 hours have sucked for up-beat story-writing-ness here as well.

The weather is gorgeous but it's not like I'm hankering to leave my keyboard and kayak or something. Then again, I write really well in crappy weather so maybe that does have something to do with it.; July 4, 2008 at 5:58 PM

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Writing Quotes

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. ~Lord Byron

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then for a few close friends, and then for money. ~Moliere

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. ~Lord Byron

I write to discover what I think. ~Joan Didion

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. ~Ray Bradbury

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. ~Winston Churchill

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it. ~Octavia Butler

Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. ~Kahlil Gibran

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. ~Ernest Hemingway

From "Byron" a BBC movie: Shelley to Byron:
"What makes you write?" Byron to Shelley: "My inability to prevent it."

Real writers can't sleep because there are stories batting around inside their heads. Real writers create characters they weep over, because they are so real. Real writers can't NOT write. I think you can make a person a better writer technically by having him/her attend workshops and creative writing programs… but I think that at the basal level, writers are born, not made. ~ Jodi Picoult

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. ~Jack Smith

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. ~Arthur Polotnik

Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves. ~C. Astrid Weber

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear - and devils, too. ~Graycie Harmon

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Goethe

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. ~Junot Diaz