What motivates me to write?

And to publish this podcast

Transcript

Earlier this month, I taught memoir at a week-long residential retreat, and my co teacher was Lily Dunn. One of the things she asked participants was this question:

What is the source of my motivation to write?

I felt like trying it myself, and wrote down the following, in answer to Lily’s question.  

I write to make patterns on a piece of paper, to leave a mark, to exercise my hand, to think out loud without anyone hearing me. To get rid of the crazy stuff in my head. To be published, and become less ignorable, less insignificant. To leave a trail of clues for future me and other people of the future. To get rid of excess energy, to scratch an itch, to get some kind of relief.

And then I added:

I write to distract, to throw up chaff, to show people this in order to hide that.

I just found that in my book, written in cursive handwriting, which I’ve been doing for the last few weeks.  And I thought I’d say it out loud, because I wanted to test whether it also describes my motivation to do these bite-sized audio podcasts.

And I think it probably does apply in just the same way.  

Anyway, a new thing that I’ve added on the podcast, if you click through to the episode homepage, you can see there’s a link to send me an email if you have any kind of response.

Be really interesting if you do. I’d love to hear from you.  Thanks for listening. Bye.

To reply, please jp at this domain name.