Embodying the writer: consistency, motivation, and failure in creative projects

Article/Video Journal Transcription | Filmed May 13, 2024, uploaded June 19, 2024

In May 2024, I started to film 10 to 20 minute long videos of myself rambling with no outline or script. These video diaries are collections of the thoughts I have throughout the week. Currently, they live in a folder titled “Yapping” on my laptop, though someday, I intend to move them into a USB stick to give to my future niece or some other protegee. Unfortunately, I don’t have either of those yet, so for now, I’ll share the contents of a video I filmed in early May titled “The Myth of Motivation.” In it, I explain my foolproof method to achieve productivity and success in creative projects by wedding your genuine passions with daily habits.

Running an Instagram writing account has prompted many people to ask me how I stay motivated to write. The first (and less favorable) answer is that I don’t start a project unless I love it enough to stick with it. When I started working on Vaguely Human Figures. I was obsessed with it, writing the first 20,000 words in less than a week. Throughout that month, I spent every waking moment writing, taking advantage of the slimmest pockets of time between other obligations to work on it. That book was, and still is, my whole life, and despite taking a break in early 2024 to focus on school, my love for it has not once fizzled out. Now, a year later, I’m preparing it for the publishing process.  

While moments of motivation are exhilarating, they’re far from reliable; if I only wrote whenever I felt motivated to do so, I doubt I would even have completed a first draft. Habits are a much better alternative. If you genuinely love a project and choose to pursue it, you must make a habit out of working on it regularly in order to make strides. This applies to walks of life beyond writing. All progress is the result of tiny decisions and lifestyle changes that accumulate over time. 

So how do you find that perfect idea? How do you maintain the discipline to work every day? 

In all honesty, I still struggle with self-discipline from time to time. This is especially true of my schoolwork, because I don’t enjoy academics. I’ve never liked studying, going to class, or preparing for tests. I’ve never even had a favorite class, because they’ve all been boring at best and insufferable at worst. Rather, I enjoy writing, reading, doing research, learning philosophy, and looking at pictures of space for fun without the iron thumb of a syllabus or a teacher’s scrutinizing red pen. Nevertheless, I still have to keep up with my schoolwork, which is where the habits come back in. If I have a bio final coming up in two weeks, I decide to start studying at that moment rather than putting it off. This allows me to suffer only a little bit per day instead of suffering for several hours at a time as I would if I crammed. However, I recognize that this example differs from creative projects because I am obligated to take bio as part of my university’s core curriculum. It’s not a passion project where I can control the process and deadlines. In either case, building habits is the ultimate multi-purpose tool when it comes to achieving anything in life.

If you're struggling to even start building those habits, I recommend you watch other people do what you want to do. On my writing account, I almost exclusively follow writers and artists. Every time I scroll through my home page, I see fellow writers updating their word count, posting reels about their books, and reading snippets of poetry, and it inspires me to return to my project. Following other writing accounts has helped me hold myself accountable (no pun intended), and I am empowered to work on my novel when I see someone else working on theirs. 

Reading other peoples’ stories can help, too. For example, I love the Adroit Journal. Every week, I go through the prose pieces and read a couple of them, and some of them completely blow my mind. (A recent favorite is Kelly X. Hui’s short story titled Iphigenia [I freaked out when I found out she graduated from my university !!!]). Constant exposure to talented people in my field helps me stay in the headspace I need to be in to create my art. 

The bottom line is that everything falls into place when your project becomes a part of your life. I am no longer just a person who writes—I’m a writer. And I’m not just a writer when I’m sitting down to do the literal act. I’m a writer when I wake up, when I shower, when I go to class, when I’m at the gym, and when I go to bed, because as I do these daily tasks, I think about my stories and see inspiration in everything around me. I see clothes at the mall that remind me of a certain character in my book. I see an ad for an elaborate espresso machine and think, characters X would totally buy that.

People who seem motivated are simply their own biggest fans, so let your project consume you. That's when the magic happens. 

I truly believe anybody can find their passion and that humans are inherently a passionate species. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t have lasted this long as a civilization or innovated to the extent that we have today. Even people who prioritize a standard office job are passionate about that stability and repetition. Passion seeps from every crack on this planet, and I firmly believe each individual has what it takes to find what that means to them. 

Diligent work on a project also establishes self-trust. I know I can get an A on a test because it’s happened before. I know I can write a novel because I’ve done it several times. Those who constantly give up find it increasingly difficult to trust themselves. Each minor success creates a positive feedback loop that drives you to accomplish bigger things as you progress and to trust your ability to stick it through. 

This isn’t to say I’ve maintained consistency in all my projects, because I have quite an illustrious museum of failures. I used to make music, for example, but I don’t anymore. I used to do fashion design, but I haven’t sewn a piece in years. Inevitably, there will be projects you give up on because you don’t see the point of continuing them or because you genuinely cannot expend even a minute of your time toward it without feeling miserable. And that’s okay. Not every idea is going to play out smoothly, but that doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. Even if you give up on a project, the progress you made on it helped you learn and grow. 

Find something new to work on, build habits, and remind yourself of why you started, because every “failure” is a stepping stone toward the next thing. 

As long as you don’t stop chasing your dreams, you have yet to truly fail.

Pictures found on Pinterest
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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/745205069623884052/ (right)