Welcome to Gaia! ::

I still have problems playing spiccato. The main reason why is that I'm afraid of it. See, I get nervous thinking something like, "Oh jeez! I have to play spiccato! Nooooo!" and as soon as I start thinking like that I tense up. When I tense up my shoulder raises up and my knuckles contract and poke out instead of lying flat on the bow. So I freak myself out about it, basically. All I have to do to overcome that is drop my shoulder... but the second I stop thinking about my shoulder I get tense again...
Blah. I prefer detache.

...
I know. When I'm relaxed it's fine. I just bought a new bow and it has a different balance point on it. It's a bit thinner and lighter than I'm used to. So my teacher is having me go back and do a bunch of bow exercises. It's thrown me off for a bit. The weird thing is that even though it's different I find this new bow a lot more comfortable.
Just not on spiccato... yet.
I remember when I used to cry if I had to play spiccato. Now it's only a big deal when I'm anxious or stressed out about something. Like right now... I'm stressing over thigs guild, my boyfriend, my friends... classic teenage drama stuff. You know.

Spicatto comes from your finger knuckle movements, not actually your whole arm (Just in case you didn't happen to know already).

Spiccato makes me scared.
In my class at school last year, there was one song where the entire intro was spiccato. It was horrible, because I was the only one in the class who could do it semi-right, it sounded so bad I wanted to cry.
There have been some pretty good tips given here that helped me a lot! Sorry I don't have any to give!

I think you just have to do it often, then it gets easy.

Mine's because of my tense shoulder and arm; I refuse to use my wrist. I finally learned it so that I could get into my top orchestra and go to national competitions and hotel gigs and stuff, but I got nervous on the audition; thirty seconds of nervousness destroyed six months of hard work.

Okay, I am only about a year into playing, but for spiccato I have the best ability.
First, you must find the balancing point on your bow, which means when you put your bow on 1 finger, it doesn't fall, but balances out like a scale. Once you find that point, make a U-shaped motion IN THE AIR with your bow as if you were playing. Then, use the same motion on the violin this time playing. At first it is VERY crunchy, but I got it after a while. Some of the best people in my class can't do spiccato, so don't be discouraged.
Hope this helped!