By Dennis Mellersh
Writers tackle book-length projects for a variety of personal reasons.
It may be to get an idea they are passionate about “out there” into the reading public; to convey information they believe is important for readers to know; to try to correct an injustice; or perhaps to collect all their stories or poems into an easily accessible literary format.
Being clear to yourself about your underlying reasons for wanting to write a specific book is important because it will be the driving motivation you will need to sustain you throughout the challenging creative work ahead in becoming a writer.
An example of strong motivation can be seen with the prolific writer Jay Parini, who wrote a 600-page biography** on the famous novelist John Steinbeck.
Parini explains his motivation in the prologue to the biography:
“A biographer, may of course, approach a life and a literary career from many different angles. What interests me is how this particular writer [Steinbeck] sustained the imaginative energy to create a shelf of books still worth reading several decades after his death. As the reader of this book will see, Steinbeck was a writer to the bone…From his early days at Stanford University to the end of his life, he devoted himself to his craft with that burning fire which seems to be a critical feature of all substantial creative artists.”
Jay Parini, born in 1948, is a university professor of English and creative writing, and is also a novelist, poet, biographer and literary critic*. He is also a regular contributor to a variety of quality magazines and newspapers.
* There is a short article about Jay Parini on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Parini
** John Steinbeck: A Biography, By Jay Parini, A Minerva Paperback, published by Mandarin Paperbacks, 1994.
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