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   If you’re a creator of any kind, whether that be a website maker, artist, author, singer, etc, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

   Sometimes motivation will come naturally to you, and you just really want to do something, but sometimes it simply isn’t there. I’m almost certain that no one is always motivated, and you don’t even have to be a creator. If you have school and just can’t ever want to do any of the work presented, I’d call that unmotivated. However, school is different, because school work isn’t always something you want to do. This is a source of unmotivation, because it’s hard to get motivated about something you’re not interested in.

   As for creators, this can be different. For me, I am an artist and writer, so when I speak from experience, this is often where I am coming from. I have a few techniques for my motivation that work personally for me, but they might not work for everyone. They’re almost all creativity-based, so keep that in mind as you read!

Experience

   I draw, I write, and I storybuild; These are things that I enjoy doing, and they’re also things I’ve been doing for a long time. When I was in third grade, I started writing a book series with my best friend. It wasn’t good – not at all – but we had fun. I’ve always been drawing, too, so my experience is almost lifetime, though when I was younger I really didn’t care about improving my drawing skills, so take that with a grain of salt.

   Though I like doing all these things, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can get the energy to actually do it. In August of this year before I started school, I had a massive bout of motivation and started a new story, changed my art style, and made a ton of other things on my YouTube channel. I don’t think I can quite recall the last time before then that I’d been so motivated. I think a major part of this, though, is that I got interested in something new – a new story. The characters had depth and detail, and as a writer, I simply wanted to expand on that.

   However, there are often times when I simply don’t want to or can’t do anything. I have my own blog where I talk about a bit of an older story, and sometimes I just don’t know what to write for it. Because of this, I’ve managed to whip up a few techniques that help me personally to gain more motivation for my work.

Techniques

• Playlists

  I am what you could call a ‘music addict’. There isn’t a day where I don’t listen to music at some point. I’m a creative person, so music helps me look into it and use my creativity to craft something around the song. Something I do when I don’t know what to do for a character and their story in my writing is that I craft a Spotify playlist around them. Crafting these playlists help me to think more about the character and their story, personality, and opinions. Since I like to listen to music so much and could never live without it, I just build off my love for it to feed into my love for other things.

• Scribbling smaller details

  For my art, most of it is larger pieces, like a full character or a background. This takes a lot of time, effort, and, well, motivation. When I don’t want to be doing one of those things, I’ll take a character and draw things like their headshots or their accessories. These smaller details are intricate and fun to draw, and I like to draw hair and eyes, so these two things help me to get excited about the character again.

• Colors

   Similar to the Spotify playlists, I like to formulate color palettes for both the character’s outside styles and their personalities. Some of my characters dress how they act, with vibrant colors for strong personalities or cool colors and a calm personality. However, there are also some who would rather not wear their heart on their sleeve, and might have a cold palette while being happy and bubbly. With these characters, I like to make palettes for their outside scheme and compare them to their inside personality ‘colors’. It doesn’t take a lot to do, but it makes me think about the characters, and sometimes I’ll figure out new things that I want with them.

   Also somewhat art related, I do both traditional and digital art. If I’m doing digital art, I like to color my sketch before I do the lineart. Doing this keeps me excited for the piece, and it helps me keep drawing it and not losing what I want out of it.

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“Of course, there is not much point in wasting our time in describing this tailor, but since it has become the accepted thing to give full details about every single character in a story, there is nothing for it but to take a look at this man Petrovich.”

“The Overcoat”, Nikolai Gogol, translated by Ronald Wilks