As often as is manageable, aspiring authors stop work at the end of their working day and then … get down to work! Why? What is it that motivates someone to spend long, solitary hours putting words on paper, when they know that at the end of writing their novel/story/poem they’re likely to face an uphill struggle to bring their piece to the attention of readers? Not even mentioning the idea of being paid for their efforts!

Well, I know what my motivation is, but, I’ve been wondering for some time now if my motivation is shared by other writers, or if, perhaps, us writers do so for completely diverse reasons.

My initial motivation is all down to my Muse, who whispers beguiling stories into my ear, blitzing my imagination and cocooning me in a world of possibilities. After all, that’s one of the payoffs for all the hours of unpaid, demanding work, isn’t it? I mean, what other job allows you to play God with peoples’ lives for a while? To be able to walk in the shoes of someone else (your character) to imagine a completely different life to your own, different challenges, perhaps a completely different world, is wonderful. It puts me in mind of the Robert Frost poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. This thought provoking piece of work expresses the limitation of life – the necessity we all face repeatedly of making a choice, which places you on a particular path, while prohibiting the choice then of another path, which, if taken, would almost certainly have given you a completely different experience of your time on earth.  It is interesting then, isn’t it, to note that it has been found that readers of fiction are more readily able to empathise with other peoples’ situations, even if they’ve never lived through anything similar?

And, oh, the bliss, the absolute joy when someone reads something I’ve written and comments favourably! Better than chocolate!

Of course, there are those authors who are able to put aside dreamy ideals and, donning a business head,  skilfully analyse the market, write to a target audience and earn a pretty good living with a minimum of time spent locked in the garret. But it’s interesting to see Ursula Le Guin’s comments as she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards.

It would seem then, that far from being alone in experiencing a thrill at being allowed to envision a life far from that as I know it,  I’m actually in pretty good company.

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