JFDI

Picture it. You know you have a deadline. You can see it looming slowly yet surely on the horizon but something is holding you back. It’s big, it's heavy, and feels like a giant backpack and it’s called procrastination with a big ol’ side of a lack of motivation. It’s one of the most common challenges any writer faces – whether you’re working in marketing or you’re a writer by trade – is motivation.

Here at The Contented Copywriter, we regularly train content teams in the art of content writing, and it’s one of the things we hear all the time.

“I find it really hard to get into the zone.“

“I’m in meetings all day, and so when I sit down to write, I feel really drained.”

“Getting the motivation to be creative is really hard.”

And look, we get it. When you’ve got a thousand other pressures, and you’re pushed for time, it can be really hard to fathom switching from the ‘doing’ brain to the ‘creative’ brain. It feels like a massive – and sometimes insurmountable – hurdle.

But here’s our big truthbomb. Brace yourself…

JFDI.

Just eFfing Do It.

Sound harsh? It probably does, and that’s because it is. Because that’s really all there is to it.

Because writing doesn’t require motivation; it’s a discipline. Writing doesn’t need you to be in the right mood. Writing isn’t necessarily even always creative. Writing just needs to be done. Like getting up and exercising, or paying your bills, or calling your mother-in-law, we just have to effing do it.

Here’s how author Joyce Carol Oates puts it (in a much, much kinder and more eloquent way):

"One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood. ... I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes ... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."

Once you start writing, you have a draft. Once you have a draft - no matter how dodgy that draft may seem to you – you have something you can edit. Having words on a page is better than no words on a page. The activity of writing changes everything.

So next time, when you’re waiting for the right mood to strike to start writing – don’t. JFDI.

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