Obstacles, hard effort, rejection, and hardship are followed by the delight of publication, massive sales, Oprah, and the Costa-Booker-Nobel Literary Grand Slam. And now the picture has been nominated for twelve Academy Awards.
What will they use as an excerpt from your biopic as a famous author? What is it that genuinely motivates you? Do you understand why people write?
What's the crux of your tale?
An example of a clip would be:
A scene from your difficult childhood, which you overcame.
The emotional goodbye when you said goodbye to your work and love interest in order to concentrate exclusively on accomplishing your objective.
The day you won that literary award and showed to everyone that you were a fantastic writer.
The long days spent honing your skills as a writer (for older writers, the film can show a wastepaper bin filling with discarded pages)
"You transformed my life!" exclaims a thankful reader clutching your sleeve.
Despite the fact that the final goal for writers is the same–a piece of published literature–our motivations for writing are vastly different. Various factors contribute to our sense of accomplishment. Finding the correct assistance and understanding what holds us back can be as simple as identifying what we enjoy most about writing.
Writers Write for a Variety of Reasons.
As authors, we have a variety of motivational urges, which are reflected in those five imagined film sequences.
To Survive.
Although we have little control over what life throws at us, some of us are motivated by challenges and opposition. Writers with this drive relish the opportunity to battle stupid publishers and harsh one-star reviewers. They get a lot of pleasure out of proving the doubters wrong.
To Achieve the Objective.
Do you prefer to have a certain goal in mind? Many writers thrive on specialized challenges, such as writing 500 words every day or participating in National Novel Writing Month. Knowing they've achieved their goal or accomplished the assignment gives them the greatest sense of success.
To Be Successful.
Few of us would refuse acclaim and awards, but for some authors, beating the competition is the primary goal. They are driven by a desire to be the greatest, to stand out from the crowd, and to win awards. They are completely aware of their sales data and Amazon rankings!
To Produce.
The act of writing provides primary satisfaction for some writers. The means are more important than the goal. They spend hours, if not years, honing their sentences and are voracious readers of writing how-to books and websites.
To Make a Difference.
Writers who are motivated by this desire to leave their mark aspire to do so above everything else. They're hoping to elicit a reaction from readers or to inspire change. The most rewarding part of being a writer is watching the impact it has on people's lives.
We all have these incentives to some extent, but we can't help ourselves if one or two of them are prevalent in everything we do. These are our primary motivators. They are the fuel that propels us on as authors, and they are the source of our greatest satisfaction from writing.
Knowing our major motivations can help us figure out what's holding us back. Consider the following scenario:
Someone who is motivated by the act of writing and polishing their work becomes stuck as a result of their continual revisions. They must develop the ability to accept "good enough." This is something to which I admit!
Someone who is primarily motivated by the desire to complete the assignment hurries to publication without sufficient revision.
A writer who gets his or her deepest delight from a nice reader response is content to rest on their modest laurels. This is something I do as well. It's as if one nice comment is enough to satisfy my motivation for writing, and I don't need to do any more marketing. This is not acceptable!
A writer who is primarily motivated by the desire to have his name on the cover of a book does not want to waste time revising what is within the book.
Someone who is overly concerned with his own performance becomes self-critical and struggles to cope with the feeling of not being good enough.
When a writer tries too hard to make an impression, he or she ends up upsetting or alienating others.
Are you aware of why you write?
Consider the following questions:
Which of the five motivational forces is the most powerful in you?
As a writer, what is the most demotivating thing that can happen to you?
When have you felt the most fulfilled as a writer–that buzz of "Yes! I did it!"... "I got there!"... "It happened!"
When the biopic of your life as a writer is competing for an Oscar, what film highlight will they show?
I just love this!!!!
Why do you like to write and what do you write about?