The first ingredient for nurturing creative energy is passion. We must be passionate about what we are creating. As a reporter, I often needed to write articles on deadline that I was not passionate about. A bad day on deadline on the crime beat could often mean writing a half dozen simple accident stories: “Two cars collided at the corner of …” Or “The fire department was called to a false alarm at …” I think I can still write those articles in my sleep.
And that is the point. Writing the basic news article, the basic memo, the basic business report is often a necessary part of our jobs, but it’s not creative. We use formulaic sentences as a way to get through this rather boring labor quickly and move to the more interesting work.
What are you passionate about writing? What story do you want to tell to inspire others? What information do you know that you want to make sure others learn? What can you tell others about your life or your work that you believe in strongly enough to give up several hours every week for the next few months to make sure that your book gets written?
If you do not feel passionately about your subject, if you do not have what one author recently described to me as “a religious fervor to tell the story,” you will probably not finish the work. Even if you do, it will lack the creative spark that makes it interesting for others to read.
I’m not suggesting that you won’t ever have doubts about your work, the time you are spending on writing it, its value or your ability to translate your ideas in an interesting, creative and readable way. Even the healthiest of egos sometimes experiences doubts. Answer the following questions:
What am I writing about?
Why am I writing about this subject?
What do I want to accomplish with my writing?
Do I believe in what I’m writing?
If you think about these questions for several minutes and cannot come up with answers, I would suggest that you do not feel passionately about your subject, and that it is time to go back to the drawing board and rethink what you are writing.
