Ah, the purpose thing. I’ve been dreading writing this one. For some reason I want to spend the next four paragraphs permutating through variations of Steve Martin’s “special purpose” discussion in The Jerk. But if as Daniel H. Pink claims in Drive, Purpose, along with Autonomy and Mastery motivate us to work harder and produce great fruit for that labor, maybe we should spend a few minutes talking about it.

I’ll go ahead and make a confession: Purpose scares me a bit. First, I used to think I had it all figured out, and the older I get, the more I realize I have a lot to learn when it comes to Purpose. Along those lines, I used to write with Purpose, which losely translated means, “with an Agenda.” The result wasn’t terribly good. It felt like I was shoe-horning my stories through a funnel of Purpose, to make a point, to teach the world something, to be transformational, whatever. It wasn’t good story-telling.

Yet, I see what Pink is after here. It’s hard to get up every morning to do hard work if you don’t feel there’s any there there. As writers, at some point we’re going to make a point, whether we’re trying to be didactic or not. A few months ago, after I’d written a few stories just for fun, I read someone said that to be a good writer you have to have something to say. Sure enough, as I read my work (during endless edit sessions) I see it there. I may not have intended it, but there it is, the something I had to say, seeping through onto the page.

Whether our purpose is to entertain readers, to connect with them in a way that lets us share our vision with them, or yes, even to redeem the world and show a different side of it, Purpose can drive us. You want to portray injustice to awaken sensibilities. You want to draw us into a different, fantastic world to get us to think about this one in a way we would normally miss. There it is: your Purpose.

Perhaps, like my cynical side you’ll scoff at this. You have no purpose but to sell more stories and pay the bills, you might say. Maybe become a famous writer with a cool scarf with a bunch of screaming fans. Really? Is that it? How’s that going for you?

Note: we don’t have to get grandiose here, or get way too over-important for our own good. Yet, I think we do better when what we do joins with an element of the transcendent. Our work and our desire to do it improves when we have good reason to believe that we are aiming for a level of significance above the mere cranking of yet one more piece of writing.

I suppose I should stop and ask what my purpose was in writing this blog post. Not to tell you what your purpose should be, certainly, but I hope to at least encourage you to think about what it might be and how it might drive your writing.

To see previous articles in this #driventowrite series click here…

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