You have to show up. Everyday. Some days will be brutal, some will have you deluded into thinking you're a master genius. It doesn't matter. Just show up. 1 page everyday adds up faster than you'd expect.

From your replies it sounds like what you might need to change is your expectation. Read some articles and interviews by other writers about their process; notice how it sometimes takes them several drafts to end up with something they want to send to the world; see how they have to cut out enormous swathes of shit to unearth the gold underneath. Fully come to terms with the fact that as much as 9/10 words you write will end up on the cutting room floor. Now ask yourself: does it matter if the first draft is shit, if most of it is going to be discarded? No! Of course not. You just want to get it down, so that your second draft has some good bones to build around. You don’t have to worry if what you’ve written is exactly what you see in your head, because you’re going to go over it again and add those details later.

Writing everyday doesn’t work for me either. I don’t have the time. It means I write more slowly, but it also means I tend to write when I’m feeling inspired and I find I end up with a lot more usable words when I’m in that zone!

This is a topic that is close to my own interests. I am going to write a few things and possibly return later when I have more time.

The books Atomic Habits and Procrastination by Jane Burka have taught me a lot about actually performing on goals that I have. They are worth reading in full, but one takeaway is that if you commit to ten or fifteen minutes of work that removes the friction about getting started and your work session will likely go longer because you are into it.

Big Magic Creative Living Beyond Fear by Gilbert has an unfortunate first chapter filled with questionable metatheory about what creativity is. But once you get past that, it is filled with stories about herself, her writer friends, famous authors including Herman Melville and Toni Morrison. She deals explicitly with psychological obstacles to writing and I love her book.

Best of luck. When you finish, if you are willing, we would love to hear about your book. (Of course follow Tildes rules about self promotion)

Over the past year and a half, I've taken to Journaling a lot more and just generally writing my ideas down for the benefit of freeing up room in my mind. Sometimes these thoughts stray towards fiction and I've been thinking about amalgamating them into some sort of story. I've been mostly using my phone for this purpose since it's always close at hand. You can even dictate to your phone to get the thoughts out.

I guess what I'm saying is that the opposite approach to "sit down and write" is to always be ready to write and just have the tools you need with you. You could at least get a thought you've been processing out of your head and look at it later for further analysis.

Maybe this isn't as effective for others as it is for me, but it's what has been working for me.

Just finish a small novel. Set a goal for 50k and start writing. 1k a day and in 50 days you'll have a shitty novel.

This is how I started and I wrote a lot of shitty novels. The first 2 or 3 are sitting on a hard drive never to be read because they're so bad, but the 4th time around I was slowly starting to get somewhere. I now do KDP for a living and have written someone in the ballpark of 50 novels over various pen names, all in the span of about 7 years. I write pulp genre fiction so I'm not going for perfection or earth-stopping prose, just get a story down and do it fairly well.

I actually think I'm a half decent writer now. I write on the rat wheel of frequent publishing so I stick to one tight draft. My books would be even better off with multiple drafts, but I don't want to get better at writing one book, I want to get better at writing as many as possible. Only way to do that is write, publish, repeat. You might even make a job out of it.

Since nobody has recommended it so far, I highly suggest integrating an LLM like ChatGPT into your creative process.

It's excellent for brainstorming ideas. It will always start with the most obvious and uninspired ideas, but if you ask for 20, there can be legitimately good ones in the middle.

If you're struggling with your plot, ask for advice.

If you literally have no idea what to do next (i.e. writer's block) go braindump what you have into the model and ask for possible directions.

If you have a section written, ask for critique. Then give the LLM a persona in your target audience and ask for another critique. Experiment with different personas for the "critic" to get feedback from different perspectives.

Before LLMs, the biggest challenge to learning to write creatively was a lack of people willing to give careful critiques. Reading thoughtfully takes a lot of time and concentration. With LLMs, this barrier is now gone, and the feedback loop for improvement is extremely tight.

The worst and least fulfilling way to use an LLM for creative writing is to just ask it to write for you. Without an extensive system of instruction and iteration (though I am working on a system for this), you will get boring but OK crap that will stifle your own voice.

However, LLMs can also be a tool to multiply your own creativity, turning written prose from brittle stone into malleable clay.

I'm going to give some less prescriptive advice than others in here (though I'd echo the idea that the only way to write is to sit down and write):

Start reading more. The more you read, the more you'll feel inspired, the more you'll feel the pull to sit down and write.

I highly highly highly recommend Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. I think it is the one "craft" book every writer needs to read. It's far less about how to write and far more about how to make writing a part of your life. I teach "Shitty First Drafts" in my freshman comp classes, because the most often-voiced concern new writers have is that their writing isn't up to par. But no writer spits out a perfect draft on their first try. They have to sit down and get the words onto page so that they can edit them into shape. Give yourself permission to write garbage. Don't let the elusiveness of perfection paralyze you and prevent you from even starting.

Another great philosophy Lamott advocates for is the one-inch picture frame. Focus on something small: Today you're just going to write the first page. Today you're just going to write the first sentence. Today you're just going to brainstorm some titles. Inevitably, you'll meet your benchmarks, and more likely than not, you'll feel pulled to keep going. And hey, now you've overproduced. Now you've got some work to edit.

Instead of telling yourself you want to write a novel this year, start small. Write a story in a month. Write a story in a week. Let yourself build up to your larger goals. No one wakes up and runs a marathon without building up the stamina for that distance.

This might sound silly but I started writing and posting erotic stories under a different name. It's easy to write, the expectations are low. I used to get stuck on a paticular word choice or a bit of scene description. But since the stakes are so low I was a lot more comfortable just letting the words flow.

I'm getting a bit bored of it now, but it's got me back in the habit of writing and the mood to do some serious writing again.

What I've found useful to just get in the mindset of writing is "playing" solo journaling rpgs like Thousand Year Old Vampire. I found it really useful to have a more guided experience, like writing prompts on steroids.

As someone that also deals with depression and the lack of motivation that comes with it, making writing fun was really useful to me and has allowed me to write more when I want to. Bonus points for the ideas I have from playing a journaling game inspiring my writing.

Hey, that's the same situation I was in literally days ago. I used to write a fair amount but rarely finished anything, then work got busy and I fell out of the habit. The method that I found most effective in the past was to set aside a specific amount of time for writing each day. It didn't matter how many words I put down on the page, but I had to focus on writing and nothing else.

Another trick I've read about and tried was called freewriting. What you do is take a piece of paper and write down anything that comes to your mind. It doesn't have to be coherent, the goal is to get into the right headspace for writing. Once you finish the page, move on to the project you're actually working on. This one was a little more hit-or-miss for me, but you could give it a shot too.

For the past three days I've scheduled myself 30 minutes to write. So far, it's been easier getting back into writing than I expected. That was nice.

I haven't written in a while, so who am I to preach? Still, I feel I have found a good approach, inspired mostly by the book Atomic Habits. My fundamental belief is that writing is easy; you literally just sit on your butt and go clickety-click on your keyboard. Consistent writers don't have any kind of superboosted willpower muscles, because willpower muscles is a myth, they don't actually exists. What they have are some habits which allows them to simply write without having to think much about it.

Schedule

1. Have a seperate writing cave with a computer you only use for writing. This is to help tell your brain that what happens in here is writing, so you don't really have to think about it. You just have go in there and sit you ass down in the chair, and you brain lazily go into writing mode because routine.
2. Set a timer and write for 2 hours in the morning at a fixed time, like 8:00 to 10:00. Two hours is short enough for you to write without burnout, and writing in the morning mean that you don't have the task waiting for you the entire day. But most importantly, writing at a specific time means that you don't have to think about when to write.
3. Seperate the task of writing (getting words down on the page) from any other writing-related task. (brainstorming, researching, editing, reading about writing, watching youtube vids about writing) Don't allow yourself to procrestinate with non-writing.
4. Don't have internet on your writing computer. If you need to research something, write it down on a piece of paper or in a notebook and look into it later. The classic authors simply didn't have the internet to distract them. They had a typewriter which could put letters on a piece of paper and that's it. No reason you should make it harder for yourself by having distractions constantly available.

Some General Advice

1. Create a playlist with the right mood for your story.
2. Have Google Docs or Zoho Workdrive on your mobile, so you constantly can type down your ideas.
3. Read books, so that you brain is reminded that this is a medium which matters to you. Also, where else would you steal your ideas?

Tips Regarding Writers Block

1. Consider aiming for short stories or flash fiction. Those are easier to finish before you run out of steam.
2. Don't be goal-oriented. Don't focus on finishing your novel. If you do, writing will feel like a failure, since you constantly haven't reached your goal yet. Instead, focus on your identity. You're an author. Now each day is a success. You have authored.
3. Write down what the core of your story is, why it matters to you. You will need to read this when you feel your story feel stale.
4. If you your brain keep worrying about being unsure about the story, set a fixed time of day where you are allowed to go on about it. At any other time, tell yourself that this is certainly a relevant topic, but you're not going to think about it right now. Then gently brush it away. Just because a thought pops into your head doesn't mean you have to give it your attention. (The idea of being in control of your own mind stems from Metacognitive Therapy (MCT))
5. If a scene in your story bothers you, sleep on it. Examine it gently or let it hang just outside your consciousness as you go to sleep. When you wake up, the solution will be crystal clear.
6. Brainstorm. Write 10 different versions and sort them by coolness. Use this for scenes, titles, names, bothersome paragraphs or what have you.
7. Or just allow the scene to suck, and move forward. You can alway go back and edit it later.
8. Or just grant yourself a break. But set an alert for the time you're going to get back into gear.

Try a different medium! Whether that's poetry when you usually do prose, sci-fi when you usually do grounded slice-of-life stuff, or (and this is what helps me) take your idea and do something completely non-writing with it. I started making collages and assemblages a while back, and that helped with the book I'm writing in a huge way..... Now the book is illustrated, and nearly finished, and it's so freeing to want to work on my project, and have options to focus on if I'm not feeling writing that day.

I've never been one to "write everyday," "just sit down and do it!" ...fuck that. Doesn't work for me. Too much pressure, makes everything feel bigger and harder than it needs to. But even on my worst brain day, "I want to work" can mean anything from writing to digging through books for collage pieces, to digital graphic design, to resin (I'm layering the collages with resin to add more depth). Or even just reading about the subject matter, that counts too.

And regardless of the medium, make intentionally bad art. Write a terrible story, draw something your 6 y/o cousin wouldn't even be proud of, take a block of wood and whittle the shittiest poking stick you've ever seen. Have fun with being creative in general, and the writing will come.

Try picking up Stephen King's "On Writing". Fantastic book and very inspiring imo.

I'm coming to this very late. I'm going to apologize that I've only read a couple of the replies that seem very good but I wanted to add in a few things that work for me.

I tend to write in waves. Super productive highs and do nothing or fuck around elsewhere lows. Seems like you're in a low point. The best thing that tends to get me back into the groove is listening to songs I've picked out for scenes/characters. My normal playlists consist of a lot of beat heavy music which for the most part doesn't jive with the slice of life/soap opera story I'm writing. Listening to things that remind me of characters/scenes makes me think about them and how I want to get them on paper.

Oh, not sure if anyone else said this or not but you do not have to write linearly. If there is a scene or character in your head yelling to get out, write that. You can always go back to the point you were working on before plus it gets that first terrible version out of your head to be improved later.

So yeah, don't try to force it. Nudge it a bit with some music (or something else that makes you think about it) and see how it goes.

Good luck!

• your fellow writer toiling through a series they won't finish before they die lol

I got myself back into doing it by setting up two things: A consistent schedule, and less limitations.

On the first point, just resolving to regularly do it will go a long way. It doesn't need to be a long time, either. For me, it's 30 minutes every other day. Regardless of how I feel, or whether I have any ideas, I will sit down and write something out. A lot of the time it's just a stream of consciousness, or something akin to a journal entry, but occasionally it comes together real well and with that I'm apt to continue. I keep these things all in one place and refer back sometimes.

On the second point, I let go of really any expectations to produce. I am not writing a book. I am not writing a story. I'm not even writing a scene necessarily. The point is to just do it in some form or other, and if it takes the shape of those things, cool. Forget the audience, don't even think of the audience, just do the thing and see what that is, has been my mindset with that.

What about writing some nonfiction? Then you're writing, but you don't need to be creative in the same way. Write a walkthrough for a video game you like, or idk, a guide to getting set up on Tildes or the Fediverse. Maybe it'll help with the habit enough that you'll start feeling the spark again, and get back into fiction straightaway.

I'm not sure I have much advice for the OP. I've written a few novels, and self-published them through Amazon, but mostly for my own satisfaction. The motivation for my writing comes from within. My first novel was an exploration of a recurring dream, where one character kept showing up. It was simple curiosity, and I had to find out all that I could about him. I could picture the first scene, but I didn't know why he was there or what the setting was. So, I started typing.

Some writers build outlines, and require structure before they can write. I'm just the opposite. I have to explore as I write, and I'm in a constant state of wonder, as new scenes and new characters appear from my imagination.

Determine your process and dive in. The first few drafts will be garbage. None of us are Mozart in Amadeus, and it won't appear on the page as perfection from above. Don't get discouraged in these first few rounds of the fight in other words.