What drives you to Write? Where do you find motivation to write and keep writing? If I had to answer this question left to my own devices, I would offer some touchy feely reply about letting my imagination fly, coming up with interesting concepts for my stories, the ability to create worlds like ours or ones totally different for the purpose of exploring how my characters interact with their environment, the challenges it presents them, how they grow through it all, and so on. Not bad stuff at all, but is that it?

If you asked me tomorrow I might come up with something else, or a paraphrase of the same that exposes different aspects of what compels me to write and keep on doing it. Maybe, if I’m honest enough, I’ll stipulate that I have some occasional silly notions about impacting the world through my writing, maybe even getting some recognition out of it.

However, Drive, a book by Daniel H. Pink has caused me to re-examine what makes me go, what makes me dislike one type of work, even if I’m handsomely paid for it, while latching onto another that offers — at least in the short term — little promise of success in the way I’ve come to define “making it in the world.” In Drive, Pink examines how society and industry has traditionally incentivized and motivated people to produce. Pink takes us for a spin through recent and not so recent history to show us how a system of carrots and sticks — punishments and rewards — have provided our sole motivation. Then he tells us, how, with some exceptions he illustrates in his Type I and Type X chapter, this is all wrong. Yes, we hate to be punished, and yes we need to pay the bills and want a few surplus income to treat ourselves to nice things, but in the end, all that falls shorts. Carrots and sticks, Pink argues, only go so far, and they seldom manage to extract our full productive potential.

Instead, Pink offers us the triad of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose — yes, AMP it up, everyone! — as the more effective way to promote productivity and job satisfaction.

What does this have to do with writing? A lot, approaching the everything asymptote, perhaps. Few of us struggling to make it as writers do it because we fear punishment or because it pays all the bills, much less because it affords us a life of comfort. And even if one day we reach the nirvana of adequate, generous compensation for all of our typing, the question still remains: is that what drives us to write and keep at it?

Or are we driven instead because writing affords us a measure of autonomy, the ability to write as we see fit — even when the critic says boo-hoo — to create unhindered by what others might think or want our writing to say? Or perhaps can we find that drive in a desire to master our craft, the need to keep improving, to misspell less, to have fewer long awkward sentences, to devise stories that engage and inspire more? Or does our drive come from purpose, the reason we want to write, the message we want to get out there, the ideas we want to come to life in our prose?

These are interesting questions and ones I want to explore over the course of three installments, each individually dealing with Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose and how they propell our writing.

For samples of my work, visit my Amazon author page.