Creative Writing and Passion

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Many pundits claim creative writing is a craft.  The writer learns to write the way a brick layer learns to lay brick.  I would agree with this assessment.  I would also content that for a brick layer to be a good brick layer there must be passion for the work.  A writer without passion will seldom do more than learn the basics of putting words down on paper and pretty much leave it at that.  Like most things in life, there must be passion to achieve what can be achieved.

Now, of course all writers are not as talented as all other writers.  But keep this saying in mind, Good writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.  A talented lazy writer may find it difficult to turn out better work then a less talented but more committed writer.  Good writing is work.  And like everything else in life the more you work at it the better you will probably get.  This is where passion comes in.

Passion is emotion.  It allows the person with emotion to channel energy into a task.  If that task is creative writing, flash fiction writing or novel writing passion provides the energy to get the job done.  Passion can provide the necessary focus.  It can provide the leap of faith that writing is worth doing well.  Without passion, mediocre writing is good enough.

It is this investment of passion that makes the passionate writer value good writing as a worth while goal to work toward no matter what the writer’s talent is.  It is this investment of the self that allows the passionate writer to embrace the self-discipline that will lead to a better and improving mastering of the tools of imagination, grammar, spelling, clarity, diction and syntax that come with better and better writing.  It is the passion for artistic form that drives the passionate writer ever onward until the writing itself takes on a life of its own.

Only passion allows the writer to transcend the self.