Writing is something I’ve done throughout my life – ever since I have been able to, really. But, of course, not everybody writes and some may wonder what motivates people to write. For today’s blog post I’d like to go over what motivates me to write, but obviously different writers (or artists) are driven by different things.
In my very earliest days as a writer, what I wanted to do was recreate the feelings of joy and excitement that I got by consuming pieces of art. There was always a certain thrill in playing a new game, or in seeing a new TV show (I didn’t read back then) and I wanted to be able to have people feel that thrill with my own works. I wanted to be able to make people laugh, or to make people care about the world I had created. In my mind, I knew what was good, so I took the best bits from all the different things that I liked and tried to put them together in a unique way. It was a case of art imitating art and I enjoyed imitating the artworks I admired.
To this day, my motivation to create occasionally comes from the desire to imitate my favourite art works, but it’s more than that now. As I’ve grown older, I’ve obviously been through more and more life experiences. There have been times when I’ve been thrilled to have my eyes opened to new concepts and perspectives, times when I’ve experienced the highest feelings of joy through the beauty of life and human engagement. But obviously these feelings aren’t a constant (I don’t think they are for anybody) and I hope to capture these feelings in my writing – for myself, as much as for anybody else. Of course, an imitation can never live up to an original, but even an imitation of something as wonderful as that is something very special.
Obviously, I don’t mean to imply that my work succeeds in reaching these lofty standards, merely that these are the goals I hope to one day meet. This is why I write and why I will always write.
(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)
