Motivate Your Writing: Using Motivational Psychology to Energize Your Writing Life

By Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., PhD

Energize and organize your writing life by tapping into your fundamental motivators.

Note: This second edition has been substantially revised and updated, including 10% more content than the first edition.

Aspiring and professional writers alike struggle to stay motivated; in the face of distractions, obligations, and procrastination, the desire to write often fails to become the act of writing. Motivated writers, notes the author, are those who have learned to identify their fundamental emotional drives and who have established a writing routine that satisfies those drives. Kelner draws on the research and insights of motivational psychology to show writers how to harness the energy of these fundamental motivators.

With a degree in motivational psychology, Kelner applies not only his training in the field but also his own original research into the motivational patterns typical of writers. Depending on their motivational profile, different writers will respond best to different kinds of feedback and rewards and will function best in different kinds of environments. Kelner explains the basic drives of power, affiliation, and achievement; he shows how these drives are manifested in a wide variety of behaviors; and he provides self-assessment tools to construct your own motivational profile.

In clear and accessible terms, and with numerous examples and anecdotes, Kelner shows writers how they can identify their own primary motivations and use that knowledge to arrange their work habits and energize their writing lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781625674876

Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., PhD

STEPHEN P. KELNER, JR. has a Ph.D. in motivational psychology. He is President of Ascent Leadership Networks, LLC, which assesses and develops top executives in ways that matter, including motivation. He has published both nonfiction and fiction himself, and has led numerous workshops for writers at conferences and bookstores based on the concepts in this book. He lives in the Boston area with his wife, noted author Toni L. P. Kelner.

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MOTIVATE YOUR WRITING Second Edition

Copyright © 2005, 2021 by Stephen P. Kelner Jr., PhD

All rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2021 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

First edition published in 2005 by University Press of New England.

Cover design by Cardboard Monet Designs.

ISBN 978-1-625674-87-6

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

To David C. McClelland, who got me started

and

to Toni L. P. Kelner, who got me to finish

and

to the many writers, artists, and other creatives in my life who motivated me to update this book

Introduction To The Second Edition

The first edition of this book came out in 2005, after an extended effort that proves the value of sustaining long-term motivation.

The origins of this book came about when helping my wife, Toni L.P. Kelner, AKA Leigh Perry, who is now an award-winning author of numerous novels and stories in a variety of genres, but at first was a struggling writer like any other. I helped her finish her first book (and second, and third, and 17 th…), and somewhere around the middle of the third book she turned to me and said "you should tell other people about this. It could help a lot of people."

Me being me, I then spent about seven years doing the research for this book: first, by asking for help from the many writers we know, assessing their implicit motive patterns, and interviewing them on their processes; second, by reading every applicable quotation by an author I could get my hands on; third, by going to writers’ conferences where I facilitated panels, interviewed writers, and presented content for others to explore; and, finally, writing it all down and showing it around. Most of the writing was done in chunks, which isn’t a bad thing for nonfiction books generally, but is especially helpful for someone who had (and has) an extremely engaging career occupying time, and who tends to work in bursts anyway.

When I had a more or less complete manuscript, it then took me another year or two to speak to agents, none of whom took me on at that time, despite definite interest. I eventually sold the manuscript directly to a small publisher; an academic press, which I think found this book aimed at a popular audience a bit bemusing. For example, I had not captured the primary source of every single one of the several hundred quotations scattered throughout the manuscript, much to their dismay. (We reached a compromise.)

In those days, blogs were new, so of course I started one on LiveJournal, which I eventually moved to Facebook, and no doubt will move to the next technology that becomes generally useful and available when necessary. Through interactions on my blog I learned a great deal that I wished I had put into the book, but I at least had it there, and shared my learnings at the conferences and writers’ groups at which I appeared.

So why go to the trouble of writing it up now?

In part, because my publisher never got this book into electronic form. In 2005 that was still rare; in 2020 it is necessary.

Mostly, however, because the writing business has changed dramatically in the past fifteen years, and the critical mass of change demands an update.

As a scientist and expert in capability assessment, I could not help but notice that the nature of publishing has changed, even if writing as such has not, but it opens the door to a wider range of approaches to writing and publishing.

While this book was and is aimed at anyone who wants to write, the toughest test as I saw it was to enable people to publish at book length, so all the initial group I assessed wrote and published at that length. While I was well aware that short stories are in some ways just as difficult (some people only ever write novels, in fact), I was also aiming to help people sustain themselves over the longest period of time, and that meant looking at book-length works. Anything that works at that length should work at shorter lengths as well. Case in point: I published a short story in 2016 that I began writing in 1999…

But I digress. While I still think it is useful to look at that length as the extreme case, it also narrowed the findings.

At that point, almost any path to publication took significant time on the part of the writer and the publisher. Now, people publish in a variety of forms: the classic book with publishers as we have seen for much of the last century, but also online magazines, serials on blogs that interact with the audience, short posts, long articles, online books, interactive novels, print-on-demand, etc. While I think all the content of this book is useful to virtually any writer, I’ve also been exploring some other channels and how it affects the motivation of writers today.

I’ve thus taken the opportunity to make some revisions based on my findings, and to add some sections requested by readers that I simply overlooked the first time around, or which were not possible back in those ancient days of 2005.

As a consequence, I’ve added over ten percent more content of this edition and revised about another 20%. I hope you find it useful.

Any comments can be sent to me via my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/motivateyourwriting.

Acknowledgments

A gawdawful lot people helped make this book possible. Though thanking everyone is difficult and well-nigh impossible to accomplish properly, I can but try.

First, I must thank my many contributors who gave generously of their time, their thoughts, and their motives to this project: Sarah Smith (with a special thank you for past criticism rendered), Susan Oleksiw (a big editorial thank you), Marilyn Campbell, Carol Soret Cope, Phil Craig, Tony Fennelly, James Neal Harvey, Alexander Jablakow, Ellen Kushner, Margaret Press, Delia Sherman, David Alexander Smith, Patricia Sprinkle, Elizabeth Daniels Squire, Les Standiford, Kelly Tate...Go on out there and buy their books. You’ll find them (and a few of their myriad titles) described throughout this book. Indirectly, I thank Writer’s Digest for their numerous articles quoting writers and how they do things, and Jon Winokur for his excellent little tome Writers on Writing.

Next, I must thank Professor David C. McClelland, my late mentor, who introduced me to the wonders of motivational psychology and guided me to a Ph.D while never for a moment defining my direction for me. I took on a monstrous dissertation, and he let me, and I am the better for it. I refer to Nietzsche here...and also directed me toward my first career as well as encouraging me in my second and third.

My friends have offered support, readings, and occasional smart remarks: special thanks to Mike Luce, Dan Schaeffer, Libby Shaw.

No acknowledgment would be complete without mentioning my family, who supported me directly and indirectly: my siblings Bill, D’Arcy, Kathe, and Tamsin, my father who taught me to enjoy craftsmanship, and my mother who taught me to read before I was two and who instilled in me a genuine love of the printed and written word. I have never suffered from the watcher to any significant degree, and I have her to thank for that.

Last and always, I must thank my wife Toni L. P. Kelner: my best friend, favorite companion, lover, writer, critic, wit and raconteur. She was the one who told me I had to write this book. Fair’s fair. I helped her write hers.

Addendum for the second edition:

I must also thank my enormously creative children, Maggie and Valerie, who caused me to think about the needs of other creatives, such as visual artists and musicians. I’ve benefited from watching their growth as artists and people above and beyond the obvious pleasures of being a parent to such delightful human beings.

Table of Contents

Introduction To The Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Addendum for the second edition:

Introduction: Motivation And Writing--So What?

Section I: Motivation--Why People Do What They Do

Chapter 1: What is Motivation

Extrinsic Motivation

The Motives

Chapter 2: Identifying Your Own Motives

Motive Imagery

Practice Scoring for Motive Imagery

Chapter 3: The Achievement-Motivated Writer

Characteristics of Achievement Feedback

Dealing with Writer’s Block and Achievement Motive

Chapter 4: The Affiliation-Motivated Writer

Characteristics of Affiliative Feedback

Dealing with Writer’s Block

Chapter 5: The Influence-Motivated Writer

Characteristics of Influence Feedback

Dealing with Writer’s Block

Chapter 6: The Writer With Multiple Motives

Chapter 7: Discovering Motives Using Reality Testing

Motive-Related Behaviors

Identifying Your Motives Worksheet

Section II

Chapter 8: Motives, Readers, And Writers

But What About Me?

Chapter 9: Being Overmotivated Or Undermotivated: The Yerkes-Dodson Law

The Yerkes-Dodson Law and Writer’s Block

SECTION III

Chapter 10: Where Writers Are Coming From

Values (and Motives)

Self-Image and Social Role—Thinking About Yourself as a Writer

The Background of Writers—Where Do They Come from?

Chapter 11: Assessing Self-Image

Using the Writer’s Self-Image Sort

Fooling the Watcher

Writing on Demand and to Demand (Can I Write on Demand?)

Chapter 12: The Impostor Syndrome (Am I Really A Writer?)

Chapter 13: Attribution Theory

It’ll Never Be Like This Again...

Chapter 14: The Problem-Solving Model--Inside A Motivated Thinker

The Problem-Solving Model in Easy Stages

SECTION IV

Chapter 15: Motivating Your Creativity

Chapter 16: The Seven Deadly Myths Of Creativity

SECTION V

Chapter 17: Overview Of Goal Setting

Present-Oriented Goals (Muddlin’ Through)

Direction and Domain Goals

Rational Goals (SMART Goals)

Chapter 18: Goal Issues--Finding Your Balance Point

Different People Need Different Goals

Challenging and Realistic Depend On Your Perceptions

The Balance Point Changes Based on External Issues

The Balance Point Changes Based on Internal Issues

Give Yourself Flexibility In Your Goal-Setting

Summary of a Good Goal

Examples of Things You Can Influence For Goals

SECTION VI

Chapter 19: Styles Of The Creative Process

Mozartian and Beethovenian Processes

Chapter 20: Steps In The Writing Process

Generate Ideas

Identify a Topic

Plotting

Research

First-Draft Writing

Editing

Rewriting

Chapter 21: Parts Of The Work

Beginning, Middle, and End

The Beginning

Starting Your Flow

Sitting Down and Warming Up

Getting to the Beginning.

Jotting Down Ideas

Freewriting

Outlining

Plotting

Monomyth: Motive

The Middle

Natural Breaks

Rewriting

Approaching the Denouement

The End

The Next One

Chapter 22: Motivate Your Selling!

Getting an Agent

Getting Past Rejection

Changing Strategies Over Time

Self-Confidence

SECTION VII

Chapter 23: Demotivators

The Environment In Which You Write

Other People

Chapter 24: Superstitions

Chapter 25: Recharging Your Motives

Chapter 26: Motivate Your Learning

Basic Principles of Personal Change

Chapter 27: Workshops

Benefits of the Workshop

Dangers of the Workshop

Small Group Research

Things to Watch

Case Study: The Cambridge Science-Fiction Workshop

A Picture of a Successful Workshopper

Chapter 28: When You Are Not Writing

Chapter 29: Support Systems

What Is Your Network?

A Far From Complete List of Writer’s Organizations and Websites

Chapter 30: Changing Your Motives

Set Your Values

Do Your Research

Find Your Reinforcers

Find Your Sources of Feedback

Find Your Potential Obstacles

Changing Your Motives—The Actual Process in Detail

Chapter 31: Last Words

Long Term Results

If All Else Fails

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

Notes

Introduction: Motivation And Writing--So What?

I can’t understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

—Fred Allen

---

I am convinced that all writers are optimists whether they concede the point or not… How otherwise could any human being sit down to a pile of blank sheets and decide to write, say two hundred thousand words on a given theme?

—Thomas Costain

---

I write because I like to write.

—Paddy Chayefsky

---

How often have you thought you could write a book, if you could only make yourself do it? There are many stories to tell in this world, and with enough work you can tell them. And yet, you may have a fine prose style, command of the language, and interesting stories but simply cannot begin writing. Or worse, if you do get started, you cannot finish. How do the professionals manage the mysterious writing process?

A writer writes, said Harlan Ellison, who should know: he won awards for speculative fiction, fantasy, mysteries, essays, and screenplays. He held that there is no secret to writing, no mystery. He wrote stories sitting in storefronts to demystify and demythologize the process of writing. He wrote daily in various genres, and won many awards for it. He is also far from the first person to make that statement; Epictetus said, If you wish to be a writer, write around the year 110.

Isaac Asimov said he never set time aside to write without interruption, because he never had a choice; when he began to write seriously, he was working in his family’s candy store. His family needed him to work, so he worked and wrote wherever he was. He wrote in crowded rooms and at the counter of the store, simply ignoring distractions. He had no privacy, so he wrote without privacy, and despite constant interruption. Almost five hundred books later, he showed no sign of stopping: The one absolute requirement for me to write...is to be awake. He wrote the last installment of his autobiography in longhand on his deathbed.

So what of the rest of us, those who would like to write just one book, or story, or whatever? Those guys who can write in a store window or with constant interruption—these people have got to be obsessive, right? They’re the kind of people who wouldn’t stop if they could. They are different, right? Abnormally gifted?

Yes and no, in that order. They are obsessed in a sense, but they do not differ dramatically from anyone else. At least, not where the ability to keep writing is concerned. Apart from practice, training, and checks from editors, the only difference between these people and you: they feel motivated to write. Interruptions don’t stop them, because their drive to write charges them up to retain their single focus, and they do not get distracted from the work at hand.

Being motivated means that on a deep emotional level, you want something, enjoy doing it, and get frustrated if kept away from it. When you want to do something that strongly, you do it! What’s more, you find time to do it.

If you have enough interest in writing to read this, I would guess you have at least as much interest in reading. (If not, go right out and get a good book. There’s lots of them out there.) If you have a real page-turner in your hand, how do you react when you have to stop reading? Violently? Do you think of the book all day, return to it anywhere you can, and stay up late to finish it? That is a simple case of motivation in action: the emotional drive to continue. You can apply it to writing as well as to reading, and indeed to anything in life.

You can find a lot of material on motivation these days, from subliminal tapes to webinars to full-blown courses to sober tomes, most of it put together by earnest people who think they have the ONE SURE WAY TO SUCCESS. ¹ This is not such a book. I will state with great sureness (though less earnestness, I hope) that there are many ways to success in writing. This book will help define your personal pattern of motives, show you how your writing relates to it, identify potential obstacles and sources of assistance, and, finally, enable you to adjust your writing to fit that pattern. In other words, to identify what turns you on, and explore how to use it. That allows your natural motivation to support your writing. The source of this knowledge is not my personal experience or a pet theory, but the field of motivational psychology. This particular brand of psychology dates back to the 1930s, so it isn’t a new idea. Research has continued steadily since that time, so we now have quite a body of knowledge.

I’m also tapping research done over the decades on creativity, the writing process, goal setting, obstacles, and other issues that can help or hinder your ability to write.

This scientific research on motivation has been applied to management, salesmanship, entrepreneurship, teaching, leadership, and other jobs quite successfully. This book discusses the scientific research from the writer’s perspective, and offers some practical suggestions for determining how you can apply these decades of research to write your book (or short story, or essay, or whatever).

And just in case the idea of psycho-babble gives you the pip, let me reassure you. The research is no good if you can’t understand it, so we’ll take a look at some real people facing the problems of professional writing. I’ll describe how real life writers write based on actual examples, and I’ll also use an awful lot of quotations. Some have written or spoken about their craft in the past; some were interviewed and studied directly by me. They’re good writers, and I’ll rely on them to make some of my points for me.

But before we get going, I have three caveats:

Caveat #1: There is no easy approach (but you can do it).

Some people start with advantages; writing comes easier for some than others. No matter what your natural gifts are, you must expend effort—perhaps an extensive effort. While I firmly believe that virtually anyone can write at some length if they really want to and that most people can even enjoy writing, the effort required may be more than you want to spend. This is not a you can become a writer overnight book. I don’t believe you can become a writer overnight. On the other hand, don’t expect boot camp or sweating blood in this book, either. (Though Red Smith said: There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.) Finally, don’t expect to read a chapter of this book and write 20,000 words (60 printed pages) a day. Though if you do, please let me know so I can quote you on the cover of the third edition.

Caveat #2: Motivated writing does not equal good or salable writing.

Having motivation will enable you to write, but not necessarily to write competently. I make no judgments nor guarantees regarding your writing ability. I can only offer this: the more you practice, the better you will get—eventually.

Fantasist Ray Bradbury thought you should write a million words, and then throw them out, because the first million are for practice. You might want to consider that a worst-case scenario. Please note that Bradbury also sold a good deal of his first million words. He wasn’t being a snob; he based his statement on his own first million words, most of which he thought were pretty bad. He isn’t alone in this thinking. He also knew that good writing and salable writing do not always overlap. There are good books that do not sell, and books that sell but are not good. The intent here is to get you to a point where you can get better and get sold, neither of which are possible if you don’t write at all!

As bestseller Richard Bach put it: A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. Lots of people write books on how to write well; I won’t bother to share my opinions on the subject. Ask the experts. This book is about writing—motivating yourself to write, and finding ways to keep yourself writing.

You may also feel that writing the book is more important than selling it. There are online groups that share their fan writing with each other, either because they can’t sell work set in someone else’s universe (though Star Trek has spawned quite the collection of professional fan fiction, and most published authors start by imitating another writer), or it is work that appeals only to a very small audience. One writer I spoke with wrote very explicit fan-fiction, with a very specific focus, which she shared with the seven people in her circle of online friends who had the same tastes. But she was happy with that. If that’s what you want, more power to you.

Caveat #3: You must find your best way to write.

In the course of researching scores, possibly hundreds of professional writers, I never found two who wrote exactly the same way. Different people write at different times, in different spaces, on different themes, with different tools. That’s fine. We’re going to focus on helping you identify what works for you. That means what other people do need not be right for you, no matter what they say.

As far as I am concerned, Rudyard Kipling nailed this one long ago, in his poem In the Neolithic Age:

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right!"

So let’s get on with finding yours!

Section I: Motivation--Why People Do What They Do

"‘If you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life—if you knew you’d never have a line published—would you still go on writing—would you?’ ‘Of course I would,’ said Emily disdainfully. ‘Why, I have to write—I can’t help it by times—I’ve just got to.’"

—Lucy Maud Montgomery

Any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good, it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

—Iris Murdoch

Chapter 1: What is Motivation

We are going to use a particular definition of motivation in this book, and it differs from the one in the dictionary. When we talk about motives here, we describe a very specific concept, developed through psychological research on tens of thousands of healthy, productive people. As a working definition, try this on for size:

A motive is a recurrent concern for a general goal of which one may not be consciously aware; this concern drives, directs, orients, and energizes behavior, and can be seen in fantasy.

—McClelland, 1984

Let’s turn this into more common English. A motive sits in the back of your head (metaphorically, not literally—let’s not get into psychobiology here) and influences you. It isn’t as specific as I want to make money or motive to get published. It is something more general, such as enjoyment in doing better or emotion around being liked.

People show an infinite range of behavior, so it may sound ludicrous when I say that only three motives can explain about eighty to eighty-five percent of human behavior overall. Nevertheless, it is true that for most people, a few basic drives explain most of their thinking and actions. That doesn’t mean that people are simple, or psychology would be a lot easier to study. What it means is that a few general drives influence a wide range of possible behaviors. Furthermore, your actual behaviors and actions are not just based on these unconscious motives. They come out of what you value, what you have been taught, what you can do well, many other characteristics of you as a person, and what is going on outside you.

For example, you may have a strong need to impress people. (This is known as the influence motive, and will be discussed in more detail later.) Some can satisfy this need by public speaking—as a politician, or as an actor. But if you stutter, you are unlikely to want the opportunity to stutter in front of an audience. In fact, you may be highly motivated not to do so, since you might have a negative impact on an audience if you tripped over a word. Making a bad impression arouses strong emotion in you—fear, anger, whatever. This emotion pushes you away from public speaking. Instead, you may take up writing, hoping to impress people with your written words.

On the other hand, you may decide that you will not let stuttering get in the way of impressing an audience, because you value public speaking ability. Then your emotions (strongly wanting to be able to influence others through speaking) push you towards working to overcome this obstacle. Actor Samuel L. Jackson did exactly this. He still stutters on occasion. He says, "I have my days. I have G days, I have P days, I have B days, I have S days, and I’m still stuttering. But as someone who loved acting (influencing) from an early age, and also because he was bullied, he found ways to master it – sometimes by switching the word, sometimes by using his favorite obscenity, which he says mysteriously breaks the pattern – and one reason he did it was for revenge." That’s an impact!

Influence motive drives the key actions in both of these cases, but in different directions. That’s why we say that motives predict behaviors—and not the other way