#FirstDraft60 Day 49 — Monday Motivation from Neil Gaiman
Monday, October 19, 2015
On Mondays, I’m going to share some writing advice/motivation from authors who may be well known to you, or whom you may never have heard of. Hopefully, you’ll find inspiration or a new way of looking at or thinking about writing from these little clips.
Today, our Monday Motivation is a piece of a Nerdist podcast interview with prolific writer Neil Gaiman on writing your first draft, writing without waiting for motivation, and more:
Hope you’re doing well with your writing. Don’t forget to check in with your progress!
For a 75,000-word manuscript, today’s cumulative word-count should be at least 47,500 words.
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KayeDacus.com 
I have been so lazy and procrastinating so much, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’m not going to complete this first draft in the next less-than-two weeks. But I really needed that reminder that Neil Gaiman gave in the video about writing even when we’re not feeling motivated or inspired to write. I’m not a poet; I’m a novelist. That means I need to write every day no matter what.
It’s not that I’ve run out of ideas for the story. Yesterday, I emailed myself an idea from my phone while sitting in my recliner in the living room binge watching the 4th season of Grimm rather than pause it, get up and go into the office, and actually write something down in my Story Bible or, heaven forbid, actually start writing the scene. And my main computer is a laptop! I could have easily gone in, picked it up, and started exploring that idea while sitting in my recliner binge watching Grimm. But I didn’t. Because I’m lazy.
And then—AND THEN—even after I went in and got the laptop, instead of writing, I found online a campus map from some school around the same size as my fictional university (James Robertson University) and spent HOURS adapting it and then naming all the buildings—AND THEN figuring out what was in each building—AND THEN figuring out not only what the major college in the university are, but what their major degree programs are, both undergrad and graduate. Hours in which I could have been writing.
And let’s not mention the SEVEN HOURS I spent re-reading the last half of Love Remains and the first half of The Art of Romance on Friday because, so I told myself, I was searching for the names of the few buildings I’d actually mentioned by name in those books. The ones I needed were all within a few pages of each other near the beginning of Art. But did I quickly jot them down and then start writing? NO. Why? BECAUSE I’M LAZY AND PROCRASTINATING.
And now here I am, writing a long comment on my own blog post because I’M PROCRASTINATING AGAIN!!!
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