Too Much Inspiration? How to Get Started

I recently read a blog post by an unemployed writer talking about what she calls Unemployment Affective Disorder, which is basically the problem of having too much time on your hands, too many ideas, too much inspiration and no motivation to actually get going on those projects that nonetheless get you really excited.

This isn’t a problem just for the unemployed or freelancers between gigs. I can’t tell you how many partially completed ebooks, novels, story ideas and queries linger on my hard drive and in notebooks. I can easily find myself excited by a project for a couple of days, even doing a little work on it, only to abandon it for the next great idea a few days later.

Many entrepreneurs and others refer to this as the problem of bright, shiny objects. Lots of projects look great in your mind’s eye that will never get off the ground, but in the meantime they distract you from the things you really ought to be doing or projects you really want to finish.

It’s all about Priorities

As usual, you need to take stock of what it is you really want to accomplish in your career and your life when you’re confronted with your own personal bright, shiny objects. Sure, writing that book of poetry sounds great now, but if you’ve never been published as a poet before it might not be realistic to shop around a full manuscript.

Instead, maybe try writing a poem a day or once a week and spend an hour a week looking for markets where you might submit individual poems. If that works out, then you can devote more time to writing a book; if it doesn’t, you haven’t spent a lot of time on the project.

If a new writing niche suddenly has you excited, again, think about how it would fit into your plan for where you want your career to go. Are you suddenly focusing on health writing because you really want to do it or because you’re seeing a ton of ads on the job boards looking for health writers?

Getting the Motivation

The author of the above-mentioned blog piece noted that inspiration is a lot easier to come by than motivation. She used the example of writing a short story collection, vowing that you’ll get up at a certain time and write for so many hours or words each day, but then procrastinating the day away even though the project was one you really wanted (or thought you wanted) to work on.

Checking your motives for wanting to follow up on an idea should help you decide if a project is really something you want to undertake.

Once you’re sure that the project fits in with your idea of what you want for your life and it’s something you’re really excited about (passion is important, after all), then there’s the matter of motivation and procrastination, or actually getting started on the thing and following through to the end of the project.

There are lots of different motivation tricks that may or may not work for you (I’ve written before about doing one thing first thing, which I think is a great way to make progress on a project). You can bribe yourself, tell yourself you can’t turn on your computer or open your e-mail until you’ve worked on the project, or take a day off from all other projects so you have no excuse but to work on that project.

Start Small and Keep Going

The biggest key to getting started on a project that inspires you but that you might not be feeling completely motivated to work on is to start small. I mean really small, if you have to. Vowing to write 2,000 words a day from the very beginning of a new project might seem too daunting, such that you never even write 200 words.

So maybe today you need to open up a Word document and do a little brainstorming, write up an outline, or even just freewrite something: “I want to start a project about X because Y and I think it ought to include A, B and C.” A document like that can get you excited about the project and, when your enthusiasm wanes partway through, you can reread it as a reminder of why you wanted to do what you’re doing.

Make an effort, once you’ve started, to do something on the project every day. Even if that just means reading over what you’ve already done or doing a little research on the web to get more ideas. Forward motion is the best motivator. As long as you feel like you’re making progress, you’ll be able to take that bright, shiny object from brilliant idea to beautiful reality.

Starting from Scratch

My background is in print journalism, and I had the privilege of growing up in an area with a vibrant journalism scene: multiple local newspapers that took part in what was known as a war, but in reality meant that there was a lot of competition for stories, a lot of good work was being done and a lot of people were employed by the publications.

As of yesterday, however, the “newspaper war” is over, with one paper taking over the others in a sort of joint-operating agreement. There’s no more competition here. None of the newspapers closed, which is a good thing, but with consolidated operations there are inevitably job losses. Many others were required to reapply for their jobs if they wanted to keep them.

Though I haven’t been in the business for several years, I still know a lot of people who work at local newspapers, and several people I know have either lost their jobs or decided not to reapply for jobs with the new company.

All this turmoil has me thinking about what I would do if I were in a similar situation. One of my friends has decided to go back to school and focus on his freelancing work. As you can imagine, that’s probably the route that I would take as well.

I didn’t start freelancing because I had to; it was something I was interested in even when I had a day job. But if I had to start from scratch today, I’m pretty sure this is where I would want to be.

If I were facing the news today that I no longer had a job, I’d probably spend a day or two mourning the loss and then I’d hit the Internet, looking at job sites, craigslist and other resources for freelance writers. I’d start applying for jobs and sending out queries right away, knowing that the competition will be fierce but also knowing that you have to get yourself out there in order to get a yes.

I’m not saying that it would be easy for me, or that it will be easy for anyone else currently facing this situation, but that is where I would start, and where I would recommend other people to start.

It seems appropriate to be contemplating beginnings as I’m beginning to relaunch this website, and in the coming days I hope to address some of the concerns and excitement associated with starting a freelance career, whether you’re doing so because of the job loss or simply because you’re looking for a new stream of income.

And embarking on your freelance career should be exciting, even when it feels like it’s something you’re being forced into. There are many advantages to this lifestyle, and it’s comforting to know when times are tough if your career is truly under your control.