Cures for writer's apathy?

I find the best time for writing is when I am supposed to be doing something else. Give me a free morning and I fritter it away posting messages on abctales etc - but come time to cook dinner/ walk dog/ write vitally important and overdue letter - then the creative juices start to flow.

I agree completely. I suggest lining up some exams to revise for. I remember (even though it's been a few years now!) l that doing ANYTHING was more attractive than revising for exams. I would suddenly realise that even more important than remembering a list of formulae, was to rearrange all my books into alphabetical order by title, no, better still, by author, hmm... haven't cleaned those shoes for a while... Your choice will then by writing your masterpiece or exam revision. A choice like that ain't no choice at all.

i am terribly lazy with writing, but I think it's never a good idea to force yourself to write, it doesn't, in my experience, produce good results and leads to more disenchantment. Try to find moments when you are in the mood for writing, work out what puts you in these moods: music, certain ideas knocking around in your head, a walk in the park, whatever, and try to use that to encourage yourself to sit down and get those words on the page/screen.

I agree completely. For the past year and a half I've been filling up ringbinders and notepads with the ideas for a single story (obviously not a short one!), but have never got round to writing it fully yet. If I give myself a whole morning to write, no ideas come at all, but come the evening when there's something to do, the ideas rush like crazy. I always seem to get the best ideas for a story when I'm lying in bed at night. v. irritating as I have to keep getting up to write them down. But, i have resolved, i WILL write the book this summer holidays, come hell or (as is most likely in Britain) great floods (though I suppose you could say having Blair in power and spinning away IS hell). I keep my fingers crossed for myself. :)

I find the easiest way is to sit down and type a word, followed by another word, one after the other, even if at first it doesn't make sense then look at it again and see if there is an idea that you can work with. I also play guitar and have sometimes topped writing for a break and spent the rest of the afternoon twanging away. iceman

Writer apathy is nature's cure for Writer's Cramp.

My best ideas come to me at 3am when I have to be up for work at 6am. I am totally a night owl. Once I wrote an entire hour length screenplay in less than 5 days when I had exams coming up (that's including all the re-writes/editing/typing etc). That screenplay is still gathering dust, never having been read by anyone. And I blitzed my exams. How bizarre.

Something someone once told me. Big impact! 'If you don't do it, the worst thing in the world will happen to you: nothing.' God speed that pen!

tell me about it hennypenny. if I spent half the time writing that I spend on this bloody site I would be onto my fifth ... well .... my fifth short story by now. I do know a cure for this though. What you have to do is ... oh ... I can't be arsed to tell you right at this moment ... abcbig brother beckons...

What you're describing could be called 'avoidant personality disorder'. I find it more fun to see myself as having that than just being plain bog idle. I make it so i have a few different things going on at once. I do visual art as well as writing so if i have some artwork which i abolutely MUST get on with, I find myself suddenly writing, and vice versa. Main thing is to make sure that when you avoid one thing, you go on to do something else rather than nothing.