Keep Going

I write a lot of short stories, some of these were compiled and published as an anthology, whilst others sit on my hard drive gathering dust.  The latter are stories that I intend to take at some point and extend them in an effort to make them into full-length novels.  When it comes to writing things which are longer, I need a routine, inspiration, and motivation.  When it comes to these three things they are surprisingly hard to find when you want to write, especially when you want to take on a project that is a lot of work.

The first of the three is the idea of routine, by that I don't mean writing at a set time every day for however many weeks it takes to finish the project.  As I have said before on this blog, creativity isn't something that you can switch on and off at will - at least for me it has never been like that.  For me creativity has always been something that is fleeting, it comes, it stays briefly and then it leaves.  I have bursts of energy and bursts of creativity and when they strike I create as much as I can.  When it comes to writing short stories of novels for me this means writing for hours on end, for days on end until I hit a wall and have to take a break.  I don't sleep very well at the best of times, primarily due to health problems so I at least have the luxury of being able to write long into the night when I am in that zone.  Being able to do this repeatedly however is something that still eludes me.  Often when I have a big project I want to work on I will write intensely for days maybe weeks and then stop, my work will sit for months, and in some cases for years before I return to it and continue where I left off.  Not surprisingly you can probably tell this isn't my main source of income, if you wanted it to be then you would need to find some way of reliably tapping into your creativity, if you figure out how to do that, let me know.

Inspiration in many ways is like creativity itself, it is something that you can't reliably invoke.  Inspiration is something that occurs to you in the moment.  For me personally I use music quite a lot, podcasts of people talking, and I read every day - all of these things create avenues if you will, channels for ideas and thoughts to come to me.  Music evokes feelings, emotions, and can change your state of mind.  Music helps set a mood, happy music elevates, and sad music mediates.  Podcasts open up a world of conversations and topics where lots of little things get introduced.  Often the most interesting things you hear in podcasts that are centred around discussions are not the topic of discussion itself but all of the other little things that get mentioned in passing, all the ideas and experiences that filter through via a form of informative osmosis.  Reading too opens up a whole world of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that aren't your own, but expose you to a wider reality than the one you find yourself within.

Motivation is perhaps the hardest of the three to find.  The main motivation people assume you would have in order to pursue writing is income.  There is the idea that if you can write you will be rich.  Sadly the world doesn't work like that.  Everyone by now knows the story of JK Rowling and how she became a billionaire through writing, the trouble with that storyline is that she didn't become a billionaire through writing alone.  Her books did sell quite well, and she made a lot of money from them, but arguably she made much more from the fact they were later turned into movies.  Most books never get turned into movies, and even those that do don't go on to be the success that the Harry Potter movie franchise went on to be.  Ask Rowling if she could do it again and she'd probably be the first to tell you how unlikely it would be for her or anyone else to do that.

The other problem with this story line is that Rowling herself disputed the claim she was a billionaire and claimed it wasn't actually true.  There is also the urban legend that she was a billionaire and gave so much away that she dropped off the billionaire rich list because of it, again as Rowling herself points out, she had a lot of money but she was never a billionaire.  Most of the claim that she was centres around estimations and approximations of her wealth, that's all secondary information and guesswork, if she herself says it was never true, she's the person best qualified to inform you about her personal wealth.

When you write, if you choose to do it, there has to be a deeper motivation that money alone, if there is not then your work will be transparent and people will be able to tell the only reason you're doing it is to try and make money.  This isn't just true of writing either, you can look at YouTube and see all of the channels where people are creating content.  Those that have been truly successful and made it to the top, got there because they had a motivation greater than financial gain.  Whilst you may make the argument that isn't the case, I think the fact that most of those who made it big on that site are still there, still producing content, even though they have supposedly made millions long ago from doing it, demonstrates a deeper commitment.  If the only motivation you had was to make money and you make money then that motivation would die.  There would be no motivation to keep going. 

You can say that greed would drive people to want even more, but the truth is when it comes to money most people think it will solve all of their problems and it won't.  There is an incline that you struggle against when you have no money, but once you earn enough or have enough to satisfy all of your basic needs and enable you to realistically buy anything you would like to buy, you reach a plateau which I like to refer to as the plateau of complacency.  This represents a point where there is no net gain to you as an individual by furthering your own wealth.  Increasing the amount doesn't have any impact on your quality of life.  The only thing that changes is a number on a screen or on a piece of paper that says how much you have.  If you can already buy anything you want to buy, can afford anything life throws at you, then there's nothing to really gain from furthering your own wealth.

You might then ask why people keep going after they have "made it" and don't simply retire, the answer to that is simple, they were driven by more than money, and that drive doesn't stop just because they get money.  What you do, you must do because you want to do it, or because you need to do it, either way, there has to be something that motivates you.  If you don't already have that motivation, it's hard to create it.  If you aren't driven by desires of fame, fortune, success, notoriety, or acclaim, then it's hard to convince yourself that you should be, or to make yourself want those things.  There is of course the inevitable question you have to ask yourself, should you want those things in the first place?  The main reason most people who do want those things want them to begin with is because society has already convinced them they are things they want.  If society never managed to convince you to want them by now, you're probably not going to have much success trying to convince yourself that you should want them.