Everyone always asks "how do you get over writer's block".
And any writer who's been doing it for a while will say "you don't'. You just force yourself to keep going.
Motivation is fleeting, but habit remains.
When you're inspired, you write and write until your butt goes numb and you have to get up and stretch for a bit. You can pound out chapters when you're inspired.
Then you hit that inevitable wall. You've lost motivation. You can't find something that inspires you to write.
My suggestion is: instead of writing with all the details when you are inspired, open a blank document and just spit out every single stupid scene, dialogue, idea and concept related to your story that comes to mind.
I don't care how ridiculous it is. I don't care where you plan to place it in the story. I don't care if you don't end up keeping it.
What I care about is getting that stuff from my mind, where I will likely forget it, to something I can reference later.
Benefits of This:
You don't go back and edit. How many times have you sat down to write and ended up going back a chapter to re-read and found yourself changing a word here and there or shifting a scene or tweaking dialogue. That takes time and energy and you don't want to waste your inspired time editing.
You will likely write down the big, important scenes - the scenes that made you want to write the story in the first place.
You don't need to worry about the details and can focus on the big points. Details come later.
The story is playing out in your head faster than you can write normally, but the story is playing, so write summaries of the scene, not the screenplay.
Do not be afraid of jumping between scenes. If the ideas come to you in a jumbled mess, then write them down in a jumbled mess. You can figure it out later when you're less motivated.
When you are forced to figure it out later, you can relive the exciting parts, which may motivate you again.
Ultimately, what you'll end up with a is a massive summary dump that can be treated as an outline. It doesn't have to be neat and organized; it just has to contain information you can reference and build on.
Most people lose motivation because they lose a certain level of interest in the story. They've hit a rut or just a boring part that they have no desire to write. That is often the parts in between the big scenes.
When you have two big scene outlines written out, not only can you go back and add the details to make them a full scene, but now all you have to do is bridge them - or rather, write out what may be the 'boring' scene.
Bridging scenes becomes so much easier when you know where you start and where you are going. It keeps rambling on to a minimum and it lets you limit how much detail is actually needed, so you move along.
What I Like to Do
I write out the summary of big scenes and simple dialog with small action or emotion descriptions like this:
The cat is trying to jump from the ground to the tree; it is not doing a good job and still fails.
Me: You can do it kitty!
My cat: (ignores me)
I section off scenes into what I think would fit into a chapter. For my fics, that's approximately 10k words or 20 pages. For my webnovels, I've settled on 5k-6k words or 10 pages.
I copy and past the summary dump into a new document, title it 'Chapter ##', then write out the scenes using the summary dump as an outline. This is where I write out all the details, insert emotion and action, and actual dialogue.
It would end up like this:
I watched him crouched down, looking up from the base of the tree with determination. It was too big and I knew he wasn't going to make it. He suddenly jumped and his little claws grabbed on to the bark.
And he didn't hook them. He tumbled back down and looked almost stunned that his latest attempt failed. He was shaken, but not deterred. He returned to his original position: body against the ground, legs bent, head tilted up.
I leaned closer to the window. "You can do it, kitty...."
Jingles the Destroyer didn't care about my encouragement, but I cheered him on anyway.
And that's it. From three sentences to a small scene.
If you want, you can always go back to the summary dump and re-organize it, add a few more plot points here and there, and switch around the dialogue. The point is, you want to take advantage of the time when you're motivated to imagine as much of the story as possible and get it down for later use.
Good luck!
