What motivates new authors & poets?

Cafe Society
1

I recently saw someone reading “20 under 40: Short stories from the New Yorker” and seeing all those young aspiring authors reminded me of a question I’ve had for a while.

I’m a scientist/engineer, and for people in these sorts of fields, what motivates them is the idea of discovering or inventing something totally new, something that did not exist before.

Before, people couldn’t fly, instantly talk to people half way across the world, have access to all of human knowledge at their fingertips, etc. Now these things are possible, and they are possible because of the work of many who contributed to these inventions. The hope of one day making such discoveries and inventions is, fundamentally, what drives most if not all people in science and engineering.

So, going back to authors: what motivates them/you? This sounds silly, and I hope it doesn’t sound condescending, but what can a new author hope to contribute to the world corpus of literature that hasn’t been said already a million ways? What story type or story line or set of characters can the author write about that hasn’t been written about by countless others before?

Given the above, it seems to me that something other than “writing something that never existed before (as a concept/genre/etc)” must be motivating aspiring authors. For example a lot of books enrich the lives of many people who read them, even if the book did not break any new ground.

So, if you are an author, what motivates you?

  • Enriching the lives of people who read your books/stories?
  • Simply responding to an innate desire to express yourself?
  • Hoping, in fact, that you will come up with a totally new genre/storyline/character that has never been done before?
  • Other?
2

1.) In the first place, a writer/poet is driven to express him- or her-self, not necessarily to provide the world with something completely new. They really can’t help it. It’s that urge to create and express – to come up with their own vision that they want to put forth into something that they show or give to others. Whether or not it’s been done before, or if anyone wants to see it, or whether it makes a contribution to human society is itself pretty irrelevant.

2.) I’m a Scientist/Engineer as well as a writer, and if you think that scientist/engineers aren’t motivated by the same forces as I just outlined, I think you’re gravely mistaken. A lot of scientist/engineers may take pride and joy in adding something to our knowledge and helping the lives of others, but they get their rush from creating something original and showing it off as their own as much as any artist.

3.) Even if two artists say they’re doing the same thing i n the same medium they end up creating works of art that are nevertheless different, created by their unique inputs. That may sound like touchy-feely everyone-is-unique-in-their-own-way sweetness and light, but I’ve seen it demonstrated far too often in cases where writers try to tell the same story, or artists try to paint the same scene, or directors try to make the same film. And, again, its true in science and engineering – especially engineering. I’m fascinated by engineering contests for undergrads where they’re given the same box of materials and told to produce something to achieve a certain goal. Virtually every engineering department has such a competition, and it’s amazing how different the responses are. Even in pure Science, the way two different researchers will go about establishing a fact or proving some rule can be immensely different. I did an appendix in my thesis on the many different ways different scientists derived a distribution law, ranging from “brute force” to two-line elegance. There’s a book out with 100 different proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. Why do you need them? Why do you even need two, once it’s been proven? But people approach things in different ways.

3

I write hoping to make some money at it, and to be invited to more conventions. I like money and cannot afford convention fees.

It hasn’t worked yet.

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1.) I kinda hope to make money at it, too. But it’s not working out as well as I’d hoped. I have made some money, but not all that much.

2.) I do get invited to two conventions a year, though. And I don’t have to pay the fees. Yay.

3.) I was writing before any of this was true. Can’t help it.

L. Sprague de Camp used to tell a story about how some arm of the government asked him why he wrote. He told them that he hoped to make money, and they relaxed. They were afraid, he said, that he was going to give them some spiel about changing the world. Nonetheless, his statements to the contrary notwithstanding, I think deCamp wrote because he loved it and couldn’t help it. Og knows you don’t get good at it without constant practice and effort.

5

I like to write stories. Simple as that. As Heinlein said, you write because you can’t not write.

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These. It’s also why I sing. I imagine the same is true for any artistic endeavor: you don’t start off wanting to be the next Thoreau/Sinatra/Picasso/Baryshnikov, you start off obeying some internal imperative.

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Lots of good poets are driven to express the inexpressible. The confessionals are especially spurred on by this challenge, and the art in in the trying.

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  1. Get laid. It’s like rock stardom, only you can perform in your underwear. Wait, it’s exactly like rock stardom.
  2. Become fabulously rich.
  3. Only write a book a year, or decade if you’re really good. In your underwear.
  4. Go to parties where you are fawned over by all the cool and influential people.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?

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I think it boils down to

  1. You love reading, and therefore want to be an author (tends not to produce great writers).

  2. You have stories/poems thrashing around in your head trying to get out and you just have to write them down.

  3. You had some sort of success writing something at some point, and continue to do it for money.

10

It never once occurred to me in my life that I shouldn’t be a writer, even though I’m now beginning to appreciate the negative aspects of the profession (I can take the rejection letters, the bad reviews, the sometimes disappointing sales figures, being at the whim of a fickle public, but there’s also the sharp, stabbing pain up my arms and through my shoulders, the crippling self doubt, the distance between myself and my family). I don’t think about how my books might impact the world. I barely dare to hope it impacts one person. I just write the stories I’d like to read, try to be honest and brave, and hope for the best.

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“the art is in the trying.”

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Typical writer – always revising his work.
At some point you have to let go, even if there are errors in it.

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I don’t write much anymore, but when I started, it was because I couldn’t find enough fiction written that I wanted to read. So I decided to write it myself.

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I would say that anyone who says they are writing for the money is either hopelessly optimistic or badly misinformed. I know several successful published writers and poets, only one of whom does not have a day job that they cannot possibly afford to quit. Writing gets worked in around a 40 - 50 hour week.

Just to be published at all is a huge honour and distinction worth pursuing. Then, there are the various awards - in Canada, the Governor General’s award and the Giller Prize are extremely prestigious.

I also don’t know of anyone who seriously thinks they will write something that no one else has ever thought of.

What does motivate writers and poets is the need to tell a story. If you don’t tell your own story, no one is going to tell it for you. From there, it’s a matter of personal development whether to tell a particular story as a novel, a play, a poem, a short story, a series of interrelated short stories, but the bottom line is that writers have the compulsion to say things about the world around them, about people and about themselves.

And just because a story has been told before doesn’t make the writer any less wonderful. I’m thinking of Virgil - is the Aeneid derivative because it is an extended trope of Homer? Shakespeare wrote or co-wrote 39 plays, only two of which were based on original stories. The versions in his plays are all far better known than the source material; in fact, for many of them, the only reason we know the source material is because of the Shakespeare play. The same is true of Molière, of Beaumarchais…

Above all, I think it’s rather dangerous for the fledgling writer to be thinking of any of that - it’s too intimidating! When you’re starting out and it’s all you can do to string 2,000 words together in a coherent fashion, do you really want to be comparing yourself to Dorothy Parker?

Side comment - for an interesting example of how different writers respond to exactly the same material, read through one of the Short Fiction contests here at the SDMB, or keep an eye out for this weekend’s Poetry Sweatshop. I’m always keen to encourage people to try writing. Among other things, you gain a whole new respect for the writers and poets whom you admire.

15

This has already been said, more or less, but I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately so y’all get my pair of pennies whether you like it or not.*

Artistic endeavor is rarely about wanting to fill in white space, it’s about a desire to be heard and to create something you yourself like. With some exceptions, most artists who create new things don’t do it purely for novelty – they do it because they think said novelty will help it be noticed or heard. And often artists are either fed up with what they’ve already heard, or have some concept of a perfect expression in their head they want to get out.

*And I just realized that introduction demonstrates my point! I realize it’s been said before, but I have an overwhelming desire to say it my way and have it read.

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I’ve been writing fiction since I was first old enough to string sentences together - kindergarten or first grade - so I don’t know what it’d be like to be someone who doesn’t write. And besides, there have been a lot of stories told, but no one has told my stories yet.

Why not ask why young people are still trying to write songs? There’s a thread about why 90% of songs are about love and sex, but that doesn’t stop anyone from penning a new one.

17

Well, you can count me. I really did write and publish my book because I thought I’d discovered two possible roots* to aspects of the myth of Medusa that nobody else seemed to have thought of. Even a decade after the book was first published, I haven’t heard of anyone else that had previously suggested them. AFAIK, they’re original ideas that no one has ever thought of before.

And I’m planning on doing it again – I’ve got two other books in the works . There are lots of odd facts out there. Journals are full of people bringing them up to be accepted or shot down.

  • and lots of subsidiary details. But there are two main suggestions at the heart of the book.
18

Most writers write because at some point, generally in school, someone told them they were really good at it. And they noticed that they DID have a much easier time of it in English class than their peers. It’s like why guys put so much effort into being football players or baseball players or basketball players … at some point an adult said, “You’re stronger and faster than the other kids, you might be a professional football player or hockey player or what have you.” In both cases, parents/teachers/other adult authority figures, told them they had something the other kids didn’t, and they went with it, because it appealed to their human egotism to be better than the other kids at something.

I’m sure the adults mean well, but I wonder sometimes … what would we think of a parent or teacher who told their kid they might be able to make a living playing the lottery if they really worked at being lucky? Not much, I bet. But as has been pointed out, there are a lot more rich lottery winners than there are rich writers.