Momentum and Inertia

Special Topics in Subjects I Never Studied

We’re in the back third of June now, friends. July is creeping up in us and the second of that month marks the midway point of the calendar year. Are you halfway done all the things you wanted to do this year? I’m not.

Make sure you go read “Assistance” in The Quiet Reader magazine’s sixth edition if you have not yet done so (or go read it again if you want). I don’t like to point this out but you’re contractually obligated to read it and enjoy it, it was in the EULA you signed when you read Shelf Life. I’m just kidding, there’s no EULA, but go read or reread it anyway.

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I never studied physics in school because I understand that physics is—physics are?—that this subject is one that requires some facility with math to understand it, and I have none. The last science I remember from high school is the other kids in my chemistry class turning pennies silver in the lab while I took a nap with my head down on my desk. 

That was some quarter-century-ago faffing around and I’m still waiting to find out. Everybody said I was going to need to know this stuff for my adult life, like how to turn a penny silver or how to balance a checkbook or do my taxes, but I went to school on the cusp of the era that ushered in online banking and TurboTax, so, joke’s on them. What do math teachers say to kids to make them learn math now that the classic “no calculator” threat no longer holds water?

I don’t understand any of the math behind physics but I know what momentum and inertia are, and probably everyone reading this does, but I’ll elaborate so we all share a working definition:

• Inertia is the resistance to a change in motion; so an object in motion stays in motion until friction slows it down, and an object at rest remains at rest unless something moves it.

• Momentum is the amount of motion an object has; it is measured by the force required to stop an object in motion.

Inertia doesn’t mean that something is still, only that if it is still it will remain so until an outside force moves it; and momentum doesn’t mean something is in motion, only that something in motion requires a certain amount of force to stop.

That’s all well and good for objects in the physical world, but let’s talk about people. People are neat because sometimes we move even when an external force doesn’t make us. I can just think about motion and my body will do it. If I swing my hand down to slap the desk in front of me, my hand has motion and momentum (until it hits the desk; and then it is at rest again).

Figuratively speaking, humans experience inertia in our day to day lives. If we’re at rest, we tend to stay at rest until the force of motivation acts on us to get us moving. In motion, it’s easier to remain in motion thanks to inertia, but “friction” can slow us down: We lose motivation, and momentum, as we expend our energy and resources on that motion. 

What I mean is, in physics, an object in motion in a vacuum would keep moving forever in the absence of another force acting on it. I think that’s what happened to Major Tom in the David Bowie song; he started drifting and his rocketship wasn’t working right so he just drifted away through the cosmos forever. I’d have to listen to the more detailed Peter Schilling song to be sure what actually happened there.

Outside of a vacuum, there’s air. (Inside of a vacuum, it’s too dark to read.) Air resistance is a type of friction. If you threw a baseball in space, it would keep going in the direction you threw it, potentially forever. On Earth, there’s atmosphere, so if you throw a baseball the resistance of the air creates friction which bleeds off the baseball’s momentum, slows it down, and so eventually it comes to a stop. 

What I’m saying is that people have motivation to set us in motion, and we will remain in motion until resistance erodes our motivation; friction in the form of tiredness (running out of energy and needing to sleep); boredom (running out of interest in the thing we’re doing); distraction or waning attention (my ADHD would like a word); depression (the great demotivator); and so on. If we keep moving to the point that motivation is gone and we’re relying on some other force to keep us in motion (like desperation or fear), that is when you get burnt out.

Today’s Shelf Life is all about how to create writing momentum to use inertia to your advantage. A lot of readers won’t need this advice because you fall into one of the following two categories:

• I’m always motivated to write; I write all the time and never need to convince myself. Writing is its own motivator.

• The things preventing me from writing as much as I would like to cannot be solved by motivation.

If neither of those two categories contains you, but you don’t write as much as you wish you did, then building up some writing momentum may be the answer.

This is definitely a problem I have. I have few demands on my time compared to many of my peers with children or elder family members to care for; I have no shortage of projects to work on or ideas to write about; I have all the tools at my disposal. But I often find myself prioritizing literally anything else above writing. Some things I did today instead of writing, for example, include

• Cleaning the bedroom

• Painting my nails

• Taking a nap

• Organizing my collection of belts (really)

Today was a perfectly great day off work for me that I could have devoted to working on writing but I simply did not do that (until the Shelf Life bell tolled and now here we are). I don’t have a lot of writing momentum right now.

Now: It’s okay not to have a lot of momentum all the time. I think the message we get living in the United States is that we need to be productive all the time and that any nonproductive hours would better be funneled into some kind of hustle to bring in additional income. (And to be fair there is no shortage of people who write with the goal of earning money from writing, which is a perfectly good and valid reason to do it.)

But people aren’t meant to be productive every moment of every day. Every other apex predator, when faced with a neverending supply of food and a threat-free environment, enters a state of near-perpetual rest. Look at your dog, for instance. Look at the lions in the zoo. All I’m saying is, there’s nothing wrong with working the amount required to meet your needs and then declining to work more than that. That’s not laziness (Laziness Does Not Exist). That’s conservation of energy.

A big part of being able to build and sustain writing momentum, for me, is to allow myself the grace not to beat myself up when I don’t have any writing momentum and I’m in a slower writing period. There’s nothing like punishing myself  for not doing something to make me never want to go near that activity ever again. So if you find yourself in a writing slump and want to get more motivated to write and pick up that writing momentum, my first and best advice is to forgive yourself for being in a writing slump. If you push yourself to write past the point that you have the time, energy, and motivation reserves to do it, you’ll burn out on it like you would on anything else so first of all, do not do that.

Repeat after me. “Sometimes I write more and sometimes I write less and that’s fine.” That’s your new mantra. Take every day with breakfast and come back to see me in six weeks. 

Choose Something Fun

WiP (work in progress) got you wiped out? Put it aside and work on something else.

In writing specifically, there’s a lot to be said for finishing what you start when you’re learning. Finishing your first complete story, novel, or screenplay is a big deal. I’m leading with this paragraph because I don’t want to diminish the importance of finishing stories: That is how you learn to finish stories. I hear from a lot of writers that they abandon every work in progress about two-thirds of the way through because they got bored with it and their new idea is so much more engaging but there are lessons to be gleaned from finishing your first novel that you can’t get anywhere else.

All that said, if your WiP is giving you writer’s block, you’re stuck somewhere, you’ve fallen out of love with it, you just can’t find any motivation for that project—and that is stopping you from writing at all—then give yourself permission to work on something more enjoyable for a bit (or forever).

I often find myself in the mindset that I won’t let myself start a new thing until the previous one is done. This could be a garment I’m making, a book I’m reading, a story I’m writing, or anything like that. While I feel it’s admirable to want to finish what I started, sometimes I create a road block for myself.

Example: I was working on a very complicated blouse and I was having trouble getting the placket right and I stopped sewing for like three months. When I finally gave myself the go-ahead to skip that blouse and work on something else for a bit, knocked out three dresses in a couple of weeks and felt great about sewing again. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

Start Small

Ever heard of “the snowball method” of debt reduction? The idea is, if you have 5 different debts, instead of dividing your money among them to pay them down equally, you pay the minimum payment on 4 of them and throw all your available funds at the smallest debt until it’s paid completely off. Then you turn to the next smallest and repeat. This way, your available money to throw at debt each month “snowballs” and grows larger as you have fewer payments to split it among. Why does this work? Because paying off that smallest debt creates motivation and momentum.

A small accomplishment can generate the same or even more momentum than completing a huge task. When you reach a goal or hit a milestone, that pays off in motivation you can put toward continuing the project. If you’re looking at you’re writing to-do list and item one is “Finish my novel,” that’s a huge task and you’re not going to see that motivation payoff for another 60,000 to 80,000 words. What if your writing to-do list had items like:

• Write 500 words on my novel

• Write a brief character sketch

• Outline one chapter

• Write one scene

All of those are bite-sized writing tasks that put you closer to your ultimate goal (to finish your novel) but that you can complete in a short amount of time and get yourself some of that sweet, sweet motivation.

Stop If It Feels Bad

When you exercise, it’s normal to feel some fatigue and muscle soreness but if you feel acute pain you’re supposed to stop what you are doing. That’s a sign you’re doing too much or doing it wrong and if you continue you can injure yourself. And when you injure yourself, you know what you can’t do for a while? Exercise.

Likewise, with writing, don’t push yourself past what you can reasonably do. If you make yourself sit at that computer and pound out words to a quota even when it feels terrible, you may think you’re building a habit but the habit-forming part of your brain is only going to remember “when I do this, it feels bad” and you will want to do it even less next time. 

Remember, inertia is the inclination of a body to remain in the state of motion or rest it’s in until a force acts on it to affect its motion in some way (to begin motion if stopped, or to accelerate, slow, or stop if already in motion). You can exert force on yourself to increase motion (“make yourself” write) but if you make yourself miserable you’re also creating a force that can decrease motion (your brain’s association of writing sessions with mental unpleasantness).

If you’d rather be doing anything else than sitting down and writing right now, then go do something else. It doesn’t mean you’re not a writer. Some of the worst advice out there is that “real writers” write every single day. Some writers write every day and some don’t. They’re all real writers.

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