Writing games - advice on motivation

[Hand of Evil]

I go outside (you can do it with a friend, a young kid is always good) and play the Story Game...It is where you look at something or someone and make up a story about them. You take also take picture and build a story from it.

 

[Highland Raider]

The real answer is to write even when you don't have motivation.

Of course, that is much harder to do than say, but that is the real answer.

This.

As for the advice to "take a break" for a period of time (aside from a walk around the neighborhood or so), I decided to take a short break from writing back in May of this year . . . and I'm still on break.

 

[gamerprinter]

Well this probably doesn't help if you don't have "artistic ability", but the impetus for much of the written material I do comes from creating a map first, and in the process of doing so, ideas start to flow on what goes on at locations I create in a map. While I had ideas of wanting to do an oriental setting (before I published Kaidan material), it wasn't until I was designing my regional map for a Japan analog that the ideas began to flow. I find doing an alternate creative activity (anything other than writing) spurs my creativity elsewhere.

 

[GMMichael]

Put some inspirational music on. I like Skyrim or Game of Thrones.

Write different stuff, like switching to fluff and taking a break from crunch.

Check out some inspirational artwork.

 

[Mark CMG]

Despite the stale jokes, there is quite a bit of good advice in this video and very much related to the subject of this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAwDWe7OIF8

 

[Umbran]

I've heard somewhere that WillPower doesn't really exist, so motivation might also not exist.

Complete aside from Morrus' point: Some of what a quick web-search on that uncovers... looks a bit cursory. It may be that, for healthy folks who are not under stress doing day-to-day things, willpower as such may not really be an issue. The research seemed to be about people having willpower to persevere to do uninteresting things, when nothing real was at stake. I question the results on that basis.

For someone with major issues (fighting anxiety, PTSD, addiction or depression, say), or where the stakes and risks are high, I think the picture is probably very different.

 

[Gilladian]

When I'm trying to write something, and it isn't coming to me, or I've written drivel and can't rewrite it into anything good, I find that doing something else related but not quite on the topic helps. So if I'm writing an adventure set in a rainforest, and I can't get the plot to gel, I will create encounter tables for rainforest mountains, hills and coast, then create weather tables, then go hunting for online images of locales, then read about rainforest ecology, and before I know it, I'm brimming with ideas again.

Or, when that doesn't work, I go in the other room and start making things with polymer clay. Rainforesty flowers, leaves, and things. Miniature plants for the map. Old ruined archways and pillars. Camp gear/tents and such. If you don't work with your hands, try drawing maps. Don't try to draw "the map I need for the game". Just draw something. A ruin, a town, a bit of coastline and islands, whatever comes to mind.

For me, usually when I can't write something it is because I have a problem that I don't have a resolution for, yet. If I leave it alone, and work on other things, the problem will stew in the back of my brain until a resolution presents itself or it becomes obvious to me that I'm never going to resolve it and I need to go some other direction entirely.

 

[Mark Hope]

When I need inspiration, I re-read this, from "The First Five Pages", a neat little book on writing:

Some people give over their entire lives to writing. Thomas Mann wouldn't even interrupt his writing to attend the funeral of his son, who had killed himself. Genet was forced to write on toilet paper, as that was all he had during his years in prison. When the guards found and destroyed his life's work, he began again, recreating what he'd done from memory. Dostoevsky spent many years in a prison camp in Siberia, where he wasn't allowed to read anything but the Bible and was given no writing materials - just hard labour. But he continued to write when he got out, despite the fact that Russian law prohibited a former prisoner to be published. When the tsar read Dostoevsky's House of the Dead - given to him by friends - he cried, lifted the ban, and allowed the work to be published. Conrad, a Polish refugee, taught himself English while working on a ship, despite the fact that he didn't speak a word of it until he was twenty years old. Through sheer devotion, he turned himself not only into a proficient writer but into one of the great masters of the English language. Faulkner laboured in factories and post offices while he write his works. He said the great thing about being published was that he was 'no longer at the mercy of every bastard who had five cents for a stamp.'

It doesn't always work. But it always lifts my heart.