Motivation needs love

“You just have to love it.” 

A friend recently asked me how I stay so consistent with writing. I have a lot of motivational tricks to keep me writing, even on days when I don’t want to. But at the heart of those tricks is love. They wouldn’t work if I didn’t love it.

I think there’s a misconception to the idea of love, though. Yes, I do love writing. I love the feeling of creating a precise metaphor, or constructing an emotional sentence. That keeps me coming back. But like any love, it was a process to fall into it. 

At first, I dated writing. I wrote a few blogs for fun. Then, I made a short commitment to it. I wrote every day for 30 days. Through the good and the bad, the love for it grew. Now, it’s relatively easy to write every day because it’s clear the love I put into it comes back to enrich my life, too.