anonymous asked: Hey there! I saw this blog and I thought I’d come here because I’m in a bit of a rut. And I was wondering if you had any advice. See, I think I’m stuck. I go to write a long story but I just can’t. I can’t motivate myself to do it. My mind doesn’t want me to write anything longer than one chapter. Why? Why can’t I tell a story that’s longer than a chapter? I have so much to say. This isn’t fair. Why can’t I do this? Why can’t I just write the way I want to? What’s holding me back? 

You can write chapter two. You absolutely can. Go now and write chapter two.

If that didn’t work, I’m not sure anything I have to say below will. But I’ll try.

There are two major reasons why most writers cannot get past a certain word count:

1. Lack of motivation.
2. Lack of skill.

Neither one of these necessarily equate to laziness or bad writing, but they may both be indicative of fear.

Lack of Motivation

• This does not mean you don’t want to write your story or that you don’t have great ideas, this means you have not properly motivated yourself and that is all. Maybe you’re procrastinating because writing is hard, because it requires effort that would be easier to expend looking at cat pictures on the internet or cleaning your room. Maybe you feel guilty for procrastinating in the first place and that guilt has built a nice ten foot wall between you and your story.
  Stop compounding complex emotions onto why you haven’t continued writing and just do it. It’s easy. You just go. Write because you have to because without you the story doesn’t get written and never will be. It’s not pressure or guilt that should drive you, it’s determination to champion your story because only you can.

Lack of Skill

• This does not mean that you aren’t capable of writing long fiction. You are. Shut up, yes you are.
  But it’s like this: If I’ve been training to run the 100 meter dash my whole life, how can I expect my body to cope with a marathon? If I want to run a marathon, I have to train to run a marathon, and that’s a different set of skills than my usual 100 meter dash.
  How do you train your brain to write long fiction? In exactly the way you’d train your body to run a marathon: you practice. You figure out the steps it will take to get you where you want to be and you take those steps and you keep taking those steps until it’s actually freeing to take them. Is it still hard work? Yes. Does it still take time and effort? Yes. 
  You figure out those steps by reading books, by thinking about things like long-term plot and character development for your story, and by screwing up. Yes, giving yourself permission to make mistakes and maybe even suck a little—that’s how you become the writer you want to be. It is a first draft, after all. It doesn’t have to be perfect or even very good. It just has to exist.
  The only way you can truly fail is if you don’t try at all.
  

You can write chapter two. You absolutely can. Go now and write chapter two.