The Problem Isn’t Motivation. It’s Friction
What's really standing between you and the page
When writing isn’t happening, we reach for a familiar explanation: I just don’t feel motivated. We frame motivation as something we either possess or lack, a kind of personal resource that determines whether we can show up to the page. When it’s missing, we assume the fault lies somewhere deep within us—that we’re not disciplined enough, not committed enough, not cut out for this work.
In my experience coaching writers, this diagnosis that we lack discipline or commitment is almost always misguided.
Here are two main reasons:
First, we misunderstand the relationship between motivation and action. We treat motivation or inspiration as a prerequisite for writing when, in fact, motivation to write and the muse emerge after we've begun, not before. The act of writing generates momentum and draws us into the idea world, but we expect to feel pulled toward the work before we’ve even opened the document. I’ve written about this dynamic before:
Second, and far more often than we realize, the issue isn’t motivation at all—it’s friction, as habit guru James Clear describes it. Academic writing is imbued with friction, both visible and invisible, and most of us have learned to interpret that friction as evidence of our own inadequacy rather than as a feature of the system itself.
Friction is anything that makes starting or sustaining the work feel heavier than it needs to be. Some forms are obvious enough: overloaded teaching schedules, relentless email, or committee work that multiplies like kudzu.
But there’s also a quieter, more insidious kind of friction that operates beneath conscious awareness, draining energy before you’ve managed to write a single sentence.
This includes things like
Unclear next steps in a project that feels too large to parse
A draft so disjointed you can’t figure out where to enter it
Feedback that might be technically useful but feels emotionally destabilizing
The lingering sense that whatever you produce will inevitably fall short of some invisible standard
None of this announces itself as “lack of motivation.” Instead, it manifests as avoidance, procrastination, paralysis, or bone-deep exhaustion that no amount of coffee seems to touch.
When we try to summon more willpower or self-discipline to cope with these symptoms, we miss the chance to restructure the work and reduce friction.
I encounter this pattern frequently in my work with writers. Someone sits down with the vague intention to “work on the article.” Within minutes, they feel overwhelmed and reach for their phone, their email, literally anything else. Not because they’re lazy or incapable or uncommitted to their scholarship, but because the task before them is fundamentally underspecified.
When your brain doesn’t know what success would look like in the next hour, what counts as meaningful progress, or where to direct attention first, it does what any sensible organism would do and looks for relief elsewhere.
That is fundamentally not a motivation problem. Instead, it’s a process problem.
As James Clear advises us, reducing friction means making decisions in advance so you don’t have to negotiate with yourself in the moment of sitting down to write.
It means leaving yourself clear notes about where to pick up next time so you’re not starting each session by trying to reconstruct your entire argument from memory.
It means naming the smallest viable next step with enough specificity that you could begin without having to think too hard about what “begin” means.
It means ending a writing session with a sense of orientation and forward momentum rather than depletion and confusion about what just happened.
Read more about the diary method for keeping up with writing projects here:
Sometimes this looks like giving yourself explicit permission to work on the section that feels easiest right now instead of forcing yourself to tackle the most intimidating part first. Or acknowledging that after receiving difficult feedback, your actual next task is emotional restabilization and making sense of what you heard instead of immediately diving into revisions while you’re still reeling.
When writers tell me they suddenly feel “more motivated” after we’ve adjusted their process together, it’s not because they’ve discovered hidden reserves of willpower. It’s because the friction standing between them and the work has been lowered enough for momentum to become possible.
Motivation, it turns out, is often an outcome of a good process rather than a prerequisite for writing.
So if writing feels impossibly hard right now, if you keep sitting down with good intentions only to find yourself unable to begin, try asking a different question. Not What’s wrong with me? but
Where is the resistance actually coming from?
What about this specific task feels unclear, overloaded, emotionally charged, or structurally unwieldy?
Addressing those questions won’t eliminate the inherent difficulty of intellectual work because writing and thinking will always require effort and attention. But addressing those questions can transform the work from something that feels impossible into something that feels merely hard.
And hard, as it turns out, is something we can work with. Hard is often enough for motivation to take root and begin to grow.