What Motivates Me to Write?

Currently in the process of editing my first Sci-Fi novel, I’ve been knee-deep in random scientific blogs and trivia for a couple of months. And although my own story leans more towards political biopunk than psycho robotics, one of the topics that immediately grabbed my interest as I was doing my research was artificial intelligence (AI), and the ways in which it can affect the future of humanity.

When we think about AI going wrong, we usually imagine megalomaniac supercomputers with a God complex wanting to enslave (or eliminate) humanity. The idea of an AI trying to take over the world never really made much sense to me, though. I don’t claim to be an expert on AI, so I might well be wrong about this (as with everything else scientific).

But common sense tells me that if I was designing a machine meant to perform domestic cleaning duties, I wouldn’t want to give it a wide enough emotional range that it might one day feel the need to marry my partner and sleep on my bed.

An AI is, at the end of the day, a machine. It must originally have been designed for a particular purpose, like all machines. Why would you design a powerful machine (say for coal mining) that had — or could develop — human desires, such as power, love, validation, etc.? What purpose could that possibly serve?

The Paperclip Maximizer and the Mysteries of Motivation

While wondering about such nitty-gritties of common Sci-Fi tropes, I came upon a theoretical doomsday scenario known as the “Paperclip Maximizer”. For those of you who don’t know what that is, the Paperclip Maximizer is a hypothetical AI that was designed for the purpose of making paperclips and enhancing the efficiency of paperclip-making processes.

Over time, this AI would find ways to make more and more paperclips within shorter and shorter time periods. It would enhance the efficiency of paperclip manufacturing processes and learn/invent more ways to maximize the number of paperclips being made.

The Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment posits the possibility that the AI would eventually turn all matter in its surroundings (including life forms) into paperclips. Eventually, assuming the AI was strong enough, it would turn the entire world (or even the galaxy) into paperclips.

This idea fascinated me. For the first time, I was reading about an AI related doomsday scenario that didn’t rely on a random machine spontaneously developing the motivational structure of a generic movie super-villain.

The Paperclip Maximizer would probably kill us. Not because it hates us or wants to rule over us, but simply because we are made up of atoms and molecules that would be better utilized in the manufacturing of paperclips, which is the only thing that it is motivated to accomplish.

So this got me thinking — what is motivation? Where does it come from? Why are we so motivated to do certain things and not others? Why do some people have more motivation than others, and why would the same person have lots of motivation for one type of activity but very little for others?

Underneath it all, I guess I was really trying to figure out my own motivational patterns — to understand them and hopefully to get a better handle on them.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation

I mean, there are of course certain extrinsic things that motivate us, the chief among them being money. We all want money and are willing to work for it, but the extent to which we are willing to do so varies widely.

What is it that we are looking for when we try to earn money, anyway? Not the paper currency, surely.

On a very basic level, money gives us access to other people’s time, energy, and talent. If you have money, you can ask someone else to look after your children, manage your finances, or wash your clothes.

Even when we buy a comb, a video game, or a refrigerator, we’re indirectly paying someone else to design and make those items for us. The more money we have, the more of other people’s time, talent, and energy we can buy, which in turn will make our own life easier and more entertaining.

That’s an understandable desire to have. And yet, we don’t all have it to the same extent. We all know of extraordinary people who serve others for free and even spend their own money to help those in need — with no expectations of reward. But those are not the types of people I’m talking about here.

Everything we do has an opportunity cost. Logically, assuming that money was the primary motivating factor for our actions, we’d plan every step with the goal of maximizing income.

And yet, people write novels in unpopular genres, start YouTube channels on niche subjects that’d never get them a million subscribers, and take up full-time jobs in industries that don’t pay well.

These are not selfless social workers whose only purpose is to serve others. Most of these people are working for some form of monetary reward, so why not work for the highest possible income or reward? Why settle for a genre that’d only allow you to sell a few thousand copies of your book, when you could instead write in one that has a far larger potential market? In fact, why write books at all? Why not use those same writing skills to write copy for brands (a far more lucrative market)?

So maybe extrinsic, reward-based motivation isn’t the only kind we need. After all, the hypothetical Paperclip Maximizer isn’t being paid to turn the entire galaxy into paperclips. So it must have a built-in reward system that makes the creation of paperclips intrinsically rewarding. To use a cliché, it’s something he’d do even if no one paid him to do it. (Yes, the Paperclip Maximizer is a guy now. Deal with it.)

So what internal reward system makes the creation of obscure books and videos, or the performance of low-paid administrative tasks, inherently rewarding for humans — so much so that they’re willing to forgo higher paying opportunities in a different domain?

A Case Study

Well, I’m something of a massive introvert. The last time I had an actual human interaction was in 1997.

So, I can’t speak for you guys. But there’s one case study I do feel comfortable exploring — my own.

I’m a writer. It’s taken me quite a few years to admit that (and that’s a blog post for another time), but now, here we are. I write. And I do so in a variety of ways, for a number of reasons, some more obvious than others.

But what motivates me to write? What do I get out of it? And would I turn the entire galaxy into tropey, angsty fiction if given the opportunity?

Well, that’s exactly what we’re here to discuss today, isn’t it?

I’m a professional copywriter/web content writer by day, freelance writer by night, and a novelist/poet/blogger by midnight. Needless to say, I write A LOT.

Why?

Well, that’s complicated. I have a 9–5 job because it pays the bills, a freelance side-gig because I like the extra money (and hope it’ll replace the 9–5 sometime in the future), and a creative writing hobby/career because I like expressing myself in words and hope to create a source of passive income a few decades down the line.

Realistically, I could earn more from a single job than I do from all the three combined, if I ditched this whole writing thing and got myself an MBA or something. So why don’t I, then? It’s certainly not because I don’t like money. Spoiler alert: I fucking love it!

So, what’s keeping me from ditching this hamster wheel for a “real job”?

Initially, I thought maybe it was because I just loved writing so much! You know, the old cliché about loving your job so much you’d do it for free? Yeah, I wouldn’t.

There are people out there who write high-quality, 100k word fanfics for fun (with no expectation of ever earning a penny out of it). I’m not one of them.

Which brings me to my next point. Writing isn’t always fun for me. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it’s difficult and tedious. It’s WORK. Given a choice, I’d much rather be reading somebody else’s book than writing my own.

I do, of course, have the hope of one day making a living from my fiction. But, at least for now, that’s all it is. A vague hope. I certainly don’t expect to make any significant amount of money from my novels in the near future. The same can be said of my poetry and this blog.

So if it’s not the sheer, intrinsic joy of writing or the guarantee of monetary payoff, what keeps me plugging away at the keyboard, day in and day out?

Well, the answer is that it’s a strange and complex combination of all of the above.

Am I passionate about writing? Yes. Do I want to make money out of it? Yes. Would I do it without one or the other? Maybe. Certainly not to the extent I’m doing it now.

What It Means to be a True Artist

There’s a pervasive myth in the arts (including writing and literature) that if you’re passionate about something, you’ll always like doing it. That if you’re a true artist, you’ll always enjoy the process of making art.

That’s a lie.

The truth is, passion can be a double edged sword. It can put the burden of perfectionism on you, where you get stressed out and anxious — not just about doing good work, but great work.

If I was just writing a diary to pass the time, or writing web copy just to earn a living, I wouldn’t agonize over every line of prose. I wouldn’t spend hours wondering if my message was clear enough, if my language was flawed or my presentation amateurish.

I wouldn’t constantly compare myself to other bloggers, novelists, and poets, only to find myself wanting every step of the way. If this was just a job, I wouldn’t care so much.

But I care with every fiber of my being whether what I write is good or bad. Whether I can connect with readers or not. Whether I can express myself with clarity or not. And this slows down the process of writing.

There was a time when the self-doubt was so overwhelming I couldn’t write a word for days. This is no longer the case, and I have overcome the problem to a great extent. But I daresay a lot of authors would permanently get rid of writer’s block if they could just get their passion (and the associated perfectionism) slightly under control.

I learned this mainly from my day job and freelance copywriting work. The deadlines with these are always tight, and there’s rarely enough time to agonize over the placement of every word and the structure of every sentence. You need to churn out a certain number of words every day and volume is oftentimes more important than perfection.

And yet, there are people reading these articles, typos and all, for the information that they provide and the value that they add. Realizing this gave me the confidence to start approaching my fiction in the same way–

Like I have something to say to my readers, and I’m going to try my best to say it well, but I don’t need to wait until my diction is perfect and my oratory world-class, before I can share my opinion or my story with the world.

The Different Types and Sources of Motivation

But despite all the learning and growing I’ve done over the past two years as a full-time writer, I still like ‘having written’ way more than the actual ‘process’ of writing.

Half the time, when I’m writing a book, I push through the most difficult scenes dreaming about what it’d look like as a finished product — on a bookshelf with a gorgeous cover, sitting next to the works of some of my favorite authors. (A girl can dream, right?)

The point is, motivations are complex and multi-faceted. They don’t spring from a single source, and they’re not always ‘pure’ and unidimensional. I don’t write just for the money, but I don’t write just for the love of it, either. The expectation of future income certainly plays an important part in motivating me to finish my manuscripts, approach publishers, write blog posts, etc.

I was super unmotivated as a student, and always saw myself as an inherently lazy individual. I wrote my first full-length manuscript in high-school. And after I failed to find any traction with it (receiving more than 30 rejections from various publishers), I lost all motivation and didn’t do much creative writing for the next 2–3 years.

Then, I graduated from college and got my first real office job. And BAM! It hit me like a train. This was it. This was my life now. This is what I would be doing for the next 40 years.

And frankly, it was quite underwhelming.

I’d spent the first 23 years of my life as a student. For as long as I could remember, there had always been something to look forward to, to prepare for and focus on. Either it was high-school or college or university or — the grand prize — a real job!

There was always something I was running towards, something just out of my reach that I was trying desperately to catch. Hence, it was easy to forget, to distract myself. To tell myself that there’s something better waiting for me just round the corner, and that this writing thing was just a distraction from the ‘real world’.

And then, real world came and hit me smack in the face. And it wasn’t bad. Just…kind of meh.

And it dawned on me that there was no pot of gold waiting for me at the end of this murky rainbow. I’d arrived at my destination, at the promised land of gainful employment that parents, teachers, and sundry relatives had all lectured me about for all these years.

There was nowhere else to go from here. But “here” wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be, forty years down the line.

The Urge to Escape Irrelevance

And so, I began writing in earnest. Not because I expected greater success than I’d had before, but simply because failing at this was better than staying stuck and unmoving, with little to look forward to other than the once-a-year vacations that rarely lasted more than a week.

Overnight, I went from being an unmotivated student who barely managed to secure a passing grade most of the time, to a highly motivated professional writer (albeit one who was still making very little money)! And exactly why that happened in the way that it did is still, to some degree, a mystery to me.

What I do know, however, is that writing regularly and calling myself a writer (if only in my own head) has changed my life in a way I’d never anticipated. It’s given me something to look forward to and feel excited about in my day-to-day life.

And that’s not because writing is easy (or even fun) most of the time. In fact, the most fun I have is during the brainstorming/outlining process. The actual writing is often stressful and always effing hard!

And yet, I’m happier and more confident than I’ve ever been before. I now have a general sense of satisfaction, purpose, and wellbeing that I’d never experienced in the first 23 years of my life. It’s not that I was particularly unhappy before. Far from it. I had a blast in college and made some fantastic friends; those will always be some of the most memorable years of my life!

A Reason to Get Out of Bed Every Morning

It’s just that, I have something now that I never did before — a reason to wake up and get out of bed every morning. I no longer have to wait for a vacation or a party to feel excited about my day. I always have something awesome or interesting to tell my readers, and that’s the best reason to get out of bed I’ve ever had!

And then, of course, there’s the more immediate monetary reward associated with my day job and freelance work. That’s a different kind of high, knowing that I’d get paid for every word I write. Sometimes, it’s a struggle not to let it eat into my creative writing time.

I suppose it’s not hard to tell where I get the motivation for that!

And the great thing about it? Freelancing as a web copywriter has taught me how to sell my writing — something no writer today can do without, no matter what their genre or format.

Is it easy trying to balance a full-time job with two side-hustles? Lol, no! And it’s not like I’m doing it that well anyway, which you can probably tell by the epic frequency of my blog posts!

But you know what? We’re all hanging out here anyway, creeping along on a tiny dust-ball suspended in space, waiting to die. Might as well throw ourselves against the wall of impossibility and give it everything we’ve got.

After all, what do we have to lose? Not like anyone’s getting out of this alive anyway, is it?

On Writing the Novel I’ve Always Wanted to Read

(image source)

I wrote my first novel in the last two years of high school. I started it in the first month of class 11, and completed it exactly one month before my higher secondary exams the next year. Now it was a relatively short novel – barely touched 65000 words – with a linear storyline. Today, I could probably finish a similar project in less than six months. But I was sixteen and confused – not an unusual state of being – and full of doubts about my ability to actually complete a full-length novel.

You see, The Classroom Effect might have been my first completed novel, but it was by no means the first one I had ever begun writing. The first novel that I ever started working on was a detective story featuring a poisoned lipstick and three Japanese sisters, one of whom fell off a tree. 

It was inspired by an Indian detective TV show called ‘Krishna Arjun’ and a Japanese anime series called ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’, both of which I was obsessed with at the time. I was all of 8 years old and the first three chapters of the novel were written by hand on an old school diary that had been only partially filled with the previous year’s math homework.

The Making of ‘The Classroom Effect’

Campus novels had been all the rage in India for a few years by the time I began writing ‘The Classroom Effect’. Chetan Bhagat had released his trailblazing ‘5 Point Someone’ (which I shall defend till the day I die). Its success had led to the paperback market being flooded with stories about young college students falling in love. So of course, I thought I should follow the steps of those that came before and pen a campus novel.

There was just one problem with this plan, though. I wasn’t in college yet. I didn’t know what life was like in college. All the information I had about college life came from the dubious ‘youth shows’ of Channel V and the aforementioned campus romances. Let’s just say I wanted a bit more authenticity than that in my novel.

So I did the next best thing. I wrote a campus novel…about a school campus. To be specific, my school campus, mostly because it was the only campus I knew well enough to describe in a coherent and believable manner for over 200 pages.

And I absolutely loved the story while I was writing it. The characters were my babies, and I wanted them to do awesome things, have awesome lives! There was a part of me in every single one of them, and yet none of them was anything like me at all. 

I wrote about the life I had, combined seamlessly with the life I wished I had. I wrote about my friends and people I wished were my friends. I wrote about the things we had done, the pranks we had pulled, the rules we had broken – and made everything less lame and more adventurous than it had actually been. It was cathartic, to say the least.

I took two whole years of ill-advised shenanigans and packed them into a single day of unmitigated epic-ness that ended in a dramatic rescue and not one, not two, but three whole declarations of undying love. Yeah, over-the-top doesn’t even begin to describe it!!

Writerly Lessons Learned and Wisdom Gained

I grew a lot as a storyteller over the two years that I wrote that book. And writing ‘The Classroom Effect’ taught me a few important lessons.

The first was that campus love stories weren’t really my thing. I knew this because the only campus novel that I had actually read and enjoyed was the one that arguably started it all, Chetan Bhagat’s ‘5 Point Someone’. I had tried to read a few after that, but for some reason could never really complete any of them.

I guess I should’ve known from the beginning why writing in a genre that I could barely read wasn’t the best idea. But in my defence, I was following the age-old advice of ‘write what you know’. At sixteen, there wasn’t much I knew about other than high school and all that it entailed.

The other lesson I learned was that romance wasn’t really my thing. I am not a romantic person, never have been. And while I could talk (quite entertainingly) about romance as seen from an outsider’s perspective, I could never convincingly portray a romantic relationship from the perspective of the characters actually in that relationship.

And I jumped through some weird and interesting hoops to avoid having to write about earnestly romantic situations in the book, because something in me knew that I wouldn’t be able to do them justice; that they wouldn’t be authentic.

In the second year of college I started writing another campus raomance (this time actually set in a college) called ‘Frivolous Deceptions’. And again, I loved my characters to bits. But the trappings of a campus romance felt even more contrived now than they had in high-school; perhaps because I knew myself better now than I had then. Whatever the reason, I abandoned the project midway and didn’t write anything else in college. Well, I wrote other things, but nothing that could be descried as a novel.

Writing the Novel I Wanted to Read

So after I finished my education last year and decided it was time to write my next book, I asked myself: What do you really want to write about?

And my mind came up with an absolute blank.

I mean, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. Not really.

I liked reading mysteries and thrillers, but I was often annoyed with their lack of character exploration and development. I liked reading fanfiction, but I was frequently annoyed by their over-the-topness, if you know what I mean. I also liked reading fantasy, but the idea of world-building scared the shit out of me.

Plus, I wasn’t really sure if any of these elements would hold my interest for the hundred thousand-odd words I would have to type out to create a complete novel.

So I decided to get scientific about it.

Asking myself what I liked obviously wasn’t working. So I decided to make a list. An exhaustive list of all the stories that I had ever loved, across mediums.

The completed list, once I had finished compiling it, consisted of 6 of my all-time favorite books, 2 anime series, 4 movies, 2 TV shows, 5 fanfics across multiple fandoms, and 1 song that I had been playing on loop for that entire week.

Okay, so step one was a success. I finally had a list of all the stories that I loved. The kind that got my blood thrumming in my veins and my breath coming a bit faster.

Now I just had to solve the most difficult part of the problem and we would be done. I had to find out why I loved these stories. What was it about them that I found so damn irresistible?

So one day I sat down with pen and paper and began patiently to make a list of all of my favorite scenes from every one of these stories (well, except the song, of course).

When I was done, I tried to analyze what it was that these scenes had in common. What tropes were they playing on, or subverting? What kind of atmosphere were they trying to build?

Finding the Loves of My Life

After weeks of wracking my brains for answers, I finally had something of a list. Yeah, you guessed it. I have a thing for lists.

To this day, I still believe that that was the best thing I could possibly have done for my writing career, though. It’s not something that would work for everyone, of course, but in that situation it worked wonders for me.

Making that list made me realize that the only person whose romantic stories I enjoyed reading was Jane Austen. And I probably only enjoyed them because she was more concerned with the social implications of a relationship than about the inner workings of the thing itself. In some ways, Austen had as much of an outsider’s view of romance as I did, only more nuanced and far more hilarious.

But what I loved most was the Pride and Prejudice trope that she used in many of her stories. And by that I mean the rivalry to love dynamic that was at the core of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship, and to a lesser extent that of Emma and Mr. Knightley.

But while I did love the enemies-to-friends trope, I didn’t necessarily want to use it in a romantic context myself. Which brings us to my longstanding love for buddy cop shows. Well, they didn’t really need to be cops, any sort of crime-fighting pair would do. What was important was that the protagonists must be super different from one another, and must hate each other’s guts upon first meeting.

Common Law, White Collar, Rizzoli & Isles, even Castle – you name it and I’ve watched it. And I don’t see why The Man from Uncle should be left off this list, just because I watched the movie and not the TV show version of it.

The two anime series that I’d loved the most as a child were ‘Saiunkoku Monogatari’ and ‘Fullmetal Alchemist’, and I’ll admit that coming up with a similarity between them was the hardest. I did find it eventually though. You see, what underlay both of these stories was an intense focus on regional and national politics, combined with some fantastic elements.

And while Fullmetal Alchemist focused on early-twentieth century German politics and Saiunkoku Monogatari was all about feudal China (or its fantasy equivalent), they both talked about national and international politics, tensions between states and countries, political upheavals and maneuvering. I realized that some of the other anime series that I’d liked as a kid – such as Fushigi Yûgi and Kyo Kara Maoh – also dealt with these sorts of themes, though perhaps with less depth and finesse than the two I’ve already talked about.

The final ingredient to this potpourri of beloved tropes was added when I realized that I really enjoyed reading about themes of guilt and gratitude. And this is where my love-hate relationship with over-the-top fanfiction comes in.

Because fantasy-adventure TV shows and movies often don’t have the time to deal with the emotional repercussions of some of the shit that goes down in their story-arcs. I mean, how many fantasy political thrillers have you watched (or even read) that had a realistic take on PTSD? That really talked about the emotional aftermath of being tortured, being held captive, or watching a loved one die?

And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that fanfiction does any of this in a realistic or believable manner. Well, sometimes it does, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. And I would be lying through my teeth if I said that I browse through AO3 at the end of a punishing day to read a realistic case-study of the symptoms of PTSD and depression. I don’t.

But the thing is, when you’re reading about characters that slay demons and lead revolutions every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, sometimes over-the-top is exactly what you need.

Would Captain America really go on a bender after losing his childhood friend Bucky and spill his guts to Tony Stark? Probably not. But then, you can never say never when dealing with a steroid-fueled super-soldier and an inebriated mad scientist billionaire philanthropist, can you?

And Finally – My Second Novel!

Of these realizations, and some others that will be talked about in future blog posts, was born my second novel – ‘A Flight of Broken Wings’. It started out as a fantasy narrative about two protagonists who were as different from each other as can be (and belonged to different species, just to really drive the point home).

The story revolved around a globe-spanning political conspiracy, imaginary countries and their not-so-imaginary geopolitical clusterfucks, murders, betrayals, national and racial preconceptions, and the mandatory fanficcy and over-the-top angst scene where everything goes to shit.

The life I was writing about was in no way the life that I knew (or ever wanted to, to be honest with you).

But it was a world I liked to imagine when listening to badass songs by a plethora of punk-rock bands. It was populated by characters who I wouldn’t necessarily want to live with, but whose shenanigans I would happily binge-watch on Netflix, and read fanfics about after. It had scenes I would roll my eyes at in a paperback thriller, then go make myself a hot-chocolate for the next chapter.

In short, I had written a story that I would thoroughly enjoy reading!

The Right Way to Write a Novel

And I don’t know if that’s the proper way to write a novel. And quite honestly, I don’t care! Because I had a hell of a time writing it. And I can’t wait for the day when I’ve finally forgotten the story enough to be able to experience it from the perspective of a first-time reader.

Because it is (at least for now) the only novel in existence that was custom designed to make me happy!

So I guess at the end of the day, all I’ve done is to tweak slightly the original piece of advice I received about how to write a novel. Writing ‘A Flight of Broken Wings’ has taught me that it’s not about writing what you know. It’s about writing what you love. It’s about creating your own favorite novel, made to order.

Because then, even if nobody else likes what you’ve written, you’ll always have one die-hard fan. And keeping her happy will make sure that you never want to stop writing!