Curtis Cupach asked David Wong:

Do you have any writing exercises you'd like to suggest? I try and write one thing a day, whether it be a book review or a sketched out interaction between different forms of my insanity. What I have trouble with the most is finding a starting point though. Once I get my foot on the ledge I can blather, I just need to find a better way than blindly kicking the rock face as I scramble in the dark.

David Wong I can only say what worked for me, which was establishing a site and enforcing an update schedule on myself. Even though on some level I knew I had no readers, I still woke up every day with the mindset that there was an expectant crowd of "customers" waiting to hear what I had to say and that motivated me to push through even if I wasn't feeling it. If I had a bad traffic day, I would say, "I need to write more/better, to win more fans!" If I had a great traffic day, I would say, "I need to write more/better to hold this new group of fans!" But what I was really doing was trying to force myself to stick with it, because deep down I knew I wouldn't otherwise.

This kind of mental trick, where people self-motivate with self-imposed imaginary rules, is really common. Dr. Dre never really got hate mail from people telling him he'd lost it, he just told himself that's what people were saying, to motivate himself to get back in the studio.

Or, it's like if you talk to a millionaire and they're constantly making jokes about how they're broke or fretting over paying too much for a sofa. You think they must be nuts or posturing but the reality is that this is how they stay rich - they constantly tell themselves they're on the verge of poverty. Its a mental trick to keep their motivation up.

But no two people are the same. You might not crave the same approval from the masses that I did so that might not motivate you like it did me. Everyone is different. Half of the writers I work with at Cracked can't really get moving on a piece until the day before the deadline, they need the thread of being fired to get their brain in gear. I've never been like that.

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