[ General ]

“An object in motion will stay in motion until acted on by an outside force.” - Newton’s First Law of Motion.

This doesn’t apply just to objects, but to writers as well. Once a writer has been shoved hard enough in the right direction, he/she will continue down that path until something slows or stops them. For physical objects that tends to be friction, but for writers it could be anything--real life, sickness, lack of energy, depression, self-loathing, etc.

Now, that I have you thinking. Let me change gears slightly. Frankly, the idea of inertia isn’t interesting to me, nor will be the focus of today’s topic. But it’s the concept of creating that inertia in the first place.

As you can tell, I’ve lost all inertia. Not only on this website, on my home website, and on a writing project tentatively due at the end of March (which I blew). The energy required for me to write or edit is high (editing is the worse of the two). It isn’t that I’m lazy or I feel as if I suck at the task. It has more to do with my distractibility.

I’m not as distractible as a coyote, but there always is something more interesting than what I’m currently working on. Case in point, the last two weekends I’ve gone out to the Minnesota Zoo and Como Zoo with a friend of mine “Kurst.” Both times it focused around photography (one of my many other hobbies), and sadly it didn’t take much effort to convince me to do that instead of working on my project. Even now, I realize that my current website lacks any sane ability to manage the 500+ new images that just found their way into my Lightroom library. Thus, I’m considering blowing tomorrow (well, today) writing new code to allow me to better handle manage and update my online photo gallery.

It isn’t that I don’t enjoy writing. Just it takes a less amount of energy to set me into motion on something else, and this is the critical thing that every potential writer has to resolve. This isn’t something you can just say, “My new year's resolution is to require less force to be acted on me to write.” It’s an honest fact. If it were that easy then we’d have a large amount of people producing good quality content and fewer people consuming it. Now, I’m not trying to say one should admit defeat, but one needs to consider what changes are needed to over come this problem.

So how does one go about doing this? This is an extremely good question, and one that I can’t really answer with any sincere convictions. I know it has to do with setting aside a consistent block of time DAILY (not weekly, not monthly, not yearly, but daily!) to devote to improve your writing. This may be as simple as picking two or three words of a day sites (e.g. Reference.com , Merrian-Webster, New York Times, etc) and stating you will write a simple story using those words, or it could be asking an English Teacher or editor to supply you with five things you can work on to improve your mechanics and delivery. Then you can assign yourself one per week with a writing challenge at the end of that week to prove that you've successfully understood how to correct the problem.

But, I suspect the primary answer comes down to finding a way to force yourself to be accountability to someone else, and start finding ways to reduce the distractions around you.