The matter of motivation comes up all the time with artists. I've been thinking about it a fair amount lately. Here's my contribution, which doesn't actually contribute much but which may help frame the question.
A preface (but not a prologue! <g>): I'm not talking about publishing, marketing, editing, or even planning. I'm talking about the core activity of actually writing and rewriting, and pretty much talking about novels. So.
Some write because they love it. If you aren't loving it, if it isn't fun, they say, then maybe do something else. These folks often talk about the joy they derive from writing.
Some write because they need to write. They've tried not writing and, however painful and frustrating writing is, the alternative is worse. Maybe they write as therapy, maybe as compulsion, perhaps even as habit. The key here is that the emotional reward of writing is somewhere between negative to neutral to occasionally rewarding. The rewards and pains of writing are a kind of corollary or side-effect.
Finally there are those who write because they decide to do so. They're going to go for the best seller. Or, on a smaller scale, they've decided hey I'll try my hand at a mystery. Writing is closer to a career. This sort could also decide not to write and go do something else.
It strikes me that with each type--writing as joy, as compulsion, as career--the parameters and aims of publishing, marketing, even editing, change. The advice one should listen to changes. The goals one sets change. Writing is not all one thing, and this may lie at the root of a good many disagreements I see spawn in forums, here and elsewhere. We're not all after the same thing, so the paths we take to get there will not be the same.
I know where I stand. I'm in the compulsion camp. I'm writing because I realized one day--fairly late, when I was in my 50s--that I'd been writing all my life. Huh, I said, being clever that way, it appears I'm a writer. I should get serious about that. I don't get great joy from writing (else, I surely would have noticed somewhere before age 56), and I'm not at all interested in a career in writing. And I absolutely don't know how to stop; the very notion frightens me like the specter of Death.
A preface (but not a prologue! <g>): I'm not talking about publishing, marketing, editing, or even planning. I'm talking about the core activity of actually writing and rewriting, and pretty much talking about novels. So.
Some write because they love it. If you aren't loving it, if it isn't fun, they say, then maybe do something else. These folks often talk about the joy they derive from writing.
Some write because they need to write. They've tried not writing and, however painful and frustrating writing is, the alternative is worse. Maybe they write as therapy, maybe as compulsion, perhaps even as habit. The key here is that the emotional reward of writing is somewhere between negative to neutral to occasionally rewarding. The rewards and pains of writing are a kind of corollary or side-effect.
Finally there are those who write because they decide to do so. They're going to go for the best seller. Or, on a smaller scale, they've decided hey I'll try my hand at a mystery. Writing is closer to a career. This sort could also decide not to write and go do something else.
It strikes me that with each type--writing as joy, as compulsion, as career--the parameters and aims of publishing, marketing, even editing, change. The advice one should listen to changes. The goals one sets change. Writing is not all one thing, and this may lie at the root of a good many disagreements I see spawn in forums, here and elsewhere. We're not all after the same thing, so the paths we take to get there will not be the same.
I know where I stand. I'm in the compulsion camp. I'm writing because I realized one day--fairly late, when I was in my 50s--that I'd been writing all my life. Huh, I said, being clever that way, it appears I'm a writer. I should get serious about that. I don't get great joy from writing (else, I surely would have noticed somewhere before age 56), and I'm not at all interested in a career in writing. And I absolutely don't know how to stop; the very notion frightens me like the specter of Death.