I received a copy of this book from the author in return for an honest review.
My Thoughts…
Written by a successful writer, ‘Motivation Matters’, is an inspirational motivation workbook, full of exercises that you can incorporate into your everyday life, to make it a little different, and stimulate your intrinsic motivation for writing. You have to want to write, it has to make you feel good, and this book gives you the tools to reawaken your inner motivation towards your writing.
Personally, I am drawn to this book because I struggle with my inner motivation to write novels. I write every day for my blog and read avidly, always prioritising this in my life. Despite having written three published books, I struggle to find regular time to complete the two stories, I have unfinished. So, starting this book I’m looking for techniques that will give me the motivation to write my books every day like I write my blogs.
The book is interactive and user-friendly, after a brief introductory chapter, it jumps into the exercises. The second chapter asks what motivates us? It demonstrates how, through change, and looking at everyday things differently, we can stimulate the motivation process within us.
The author provides you with an exercise a day, and one extra. I read this through like a book, absorbing some of the ideas, and trying some of them. Ideally, it should be used as a workbook, something to dip into regularly to top up your creativity. You may have favourite exercises here, but mix them up try something new. The ethos behind this process is that change stimulates creativity.
The exercises stimulate your creative brain, so once completed you should want to write, don’t put it off, or the exercise’s motivational properties are wasted. This is the hardest thing for me. I realise I already do a good proportion of the things mentioned here, but I don’t immediately write following them, I must.
The exercises are individual but grouped into chapters to allow you to work on particular areas, for example releasing your inner creativity, observing your world and different worlds. The key is honing your observational skills and changing your environment to give your creativity more scope. Downtime is important, but you need you to use what you learn in your writing.
This book isn’t something you read once and reap the benefits, it is designed to change you. So you need to regularly reinforce the messages it relays if they are beneficial for you. I like it, and I am going to see what it does for me, and my fictional writing.
The key messages I take away from my initial reading are, use what you observe, to make your writing realistic and relevant, change something every day to stimulate your creativity, set yourself goals, something to work towards, and find your balance of active and cerebral to make your writing part of your life, something you want to do.
I will follow up this review, to share how I get on.
Award-Winning Author Wendy H. Jones lives in Scotland, and her police procedural series featuring Detective Inspector Shona McKenzie is set in the beautiful city of Dundee, Scotland. Wendy has led a varied and adventurous life. Her love for adventure led to her joining the Royal Navy to undertake nurse training. After six years in the Navy, she joined the Army where she served as an Officer for a further 17 years. This took her all over the world including Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. Much of her spare time is now spent travelling around the UK and lands much further afield. As well as nursing Wendy also worked for many years in Academia. This led to publication in academic textbooks and journals. Killer’s Countdown is her first novel and the first book in the Shona McKenzie Mystery series. Killer’s Crew won the Books Go Social Book of the Year 2107. There are now six books in this series with Killer’s Crypt being released in August 2017. The Dagger’s Curse is the first book in The Fergus and Flora Mysteries for Young Adults. This book is currently shortlisted for the Woman Alive Magazine Readers Choice Award Book of the Year. She is also a highly successful marketer and she shares her methods in the book, Power Packed Book Marketing.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve written extensively for TV and radio in the UK and I’m currently developing a TV sitcom (optioned by NBC-Universal). 
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Breakfast with my daughter and grandson, definitely one of my favourite parts of the day. Though the clearing up is taking longer now he can have his own piece of toast.
