Guest Post: Not a Modicum of Motivation by Tim Turner

Hi, everyone, and welcome! Today's post will feature Tim Turner's take on motivation. I met Tim through Writer's Digest Sci-Fi Fantasy Forum as well and, let me tell you, he has a talent for descriptive imagery. But here's Tim describing himself in his own words:

Tim is a pretty all around strange guy. You probably don't want to know more about him than that. He is as of yet unpublished and the only real recognition he's ever gotten was from a celebrity onTwitter who tweeted at him, "your kinda strange," verbatim. You can't really say the celebrity was wrong, because Tim did after all write his entire bio in the third, which is not only strange but borderline creepy. He and a handful of others write SF reviews at The SF Scrivener.


And, now, onto the post!

Not a Modicum of Motivation

By and by, your attention becomes so intently focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence--the lapse of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes--all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

~Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Why write?

Writers are accustomed to mulling over the many motivations that drive their characters to plunge headlong into the sticky miasma of conflicts their sadistic brains lay out for them. But what is it that ensnares a person in the psychic torment of a writer's life?

Reading /Into the Wild/ aroused this question of motivation in me, a question that demands an immediate answer. I feel paralyzed in its wake. There's a tear-wrenching fist twisting in my gut holding me en route. As I search for an answer, no matter where I start, I keep coming back to the engimatic nature of youthful wanderlust. What is it that brings out the haughtiness in a young man, that makes him need to conquer the world itself--to stand at the highest peak, look out into the panorama of beauty, wrapped in the all encompassing blanket of nature, and then secretly utter into the infinite abyss, "Fuck you"?

I'm convinced that the same thing in a young guy's psyche that pulls on his heart strings to climb to the highest mountain in view and openly sever any connection with society can translate, or actually does translate, into male author's works as an almost unavoidable theme. But even moreso, I find it my underlying motivation to why I write. Why climb the highest mountain, when I can create a mountain even bigger and then have some fictional derivation of myself climb it for me?

So what exactly is the motivation to write? I'm gonna go with genetics for now. I'll let you know if I think of something more convincing.

So how about you? Why write?