Passion and Productivity
Bringing Writing to Life
What importance do you place on passion in your writing? Do you believe that passionless writing is bad? Is it necessary to have passion providing motivation?
When it comes to passion in writing, there are paradoxical aspects: you need to have a passion for what you do at the same time that you remain apathetic about it.
Short version: it’s better to have passion for your work than apathy, but passion also needs to accommodate practicality, which often means sacrificing something about which you are passionate.
Passion for abstract quality
Whether artist or scholar, writers have a sense of what will make a work good. Having some vision of what you want to create — a sense that it must be just so — that it must have certain specific qualities — this is crucial to doing work of quality. Sensitivity to the finer points of your work is invaluable, and a passion to get them right is important in finding the energy to deal with all the necessary details.
This same driving passion, however, can manifest as perfectionism, and thus lead to paralysis. So the writer simultaneously needs (1) to be passionate about creating a work of quality and (2) able to accept flaws in that same work. This first paradox of passion requires finding the balance between the pursuit of quality and surrendering that pursuit at certain moments. Where is the balance point at which something is good enough despite imperfection? Maybe that balance never exists, which might explain the idea that a work of art is never completed, only abandoned (an idea attributed to poet Paul Valéry).
Passion for personal significance
If you care about something passionately, that offers motivation, and it can also be problematic. I once read in a dissertation-writing book that the best topic for a doctoral dissertation is something that you don’t care about but can tolerate. Caring too much, the book argued, is a problem. I agree that passion for a subject can be problematic in research for three reasons: (1) as noted above, passion for quality can lead to paralyzing perfectionism; (2) passion about a project can lead to being over-ambitious, which creates difficulty in completing a project; and (3) passion can lead to disillusionment when the grand ideas meet the practical difficulties of bringing a project to completion. Thus passion can interfere with action.
At the same time, however, personal significance is crucial for motivation and for avoiding emotional malaise. The basic principle of Existential Psychotherapy is that people are emotionally healthier and better able to overcome difficulties if they see meaning in what they do. For any large, long-term project, emotional health and motivation are crucial. I think it’s crazy to start a project that you explicitly choose for being uninteresting. That’s a good recipe becoming miserable with your work.
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Still, there is some truth that the same passion that motivates us and makes work fulfilling can become an impediment to dealing with practical limitations. Our passion may be sparked by a grand, sprawling vision, and the work that we can personally realize may be so frustratingly, disappointingly limited, thus interfering with motivation.
On a certain level, this is a question of risk and reward: the more passion you have for a project, the greater the impact you feel from any success or failure. (There are, of course, other factors in measuring risk and reward.) As the level of personal care increases, there is greater motivation to reap the potential personal rewards of success, but that can be accompanied by an uncomfortable increase in apprehension about potential bad outcomes.
Passion for personal significance can both help and hinder the creative process.
Passion for communication
If you’re writing to reach others — if you have some message that you want to share — then, presumably, you care about communication and communicating well. Writers often care deeply about what their audience will think. (Don’t you care?) This passion can directly contribute to fear of writing: plenty of people get stuck thinking about the negative feedback they might receive in the future (especially if they have struggled to deal with negative feedback received earlier).
If you’re writing a journal for yourself or making notes to explore some idea, of course, then there’s no real relevant concern for others (which can also be a motivational problem: the journal can be viewed as self-indulgent).
But lots writing has to do with reaching an audience, and many writers wouldn’t consider a journal to be “writing” in the same way that producing a manuscript to show to others is “writing.”
The first audience most of us write for is our school teachers, which has the unfortunate consequence of getting many to think of writing as an unpleasant task that ends with often harsh criticism of our writing.
Because of this context, many writers feel anxiety about the quality of their writing and about receiving negative feedback.
A commonly expressed principle for developing a good writing practice is to write without concern for what others will think, at least with first drafts. This can be difficult when your goal is to share your work. But it’s good to remember that worrying about other people takes your attention from your subject, and increases stress related to potential outcomes of your effort. You need, in other words, to put aside for a time the desire to communicate so you can focus on your own ideas.
Once, you’ve got something on the page, it becomes more valuable to think about your audience and what they would like. Focusing on your audience and on trying to understand them and their interests helps you develop a manuscript suitable for your desired audience.
Thinking in terms of communication creates a tension between the ideas that you want to express and the ideas that you think the audience wants to hear. In practice this tension requires compromise between staying true to your ideas as you understand them and your best guess as to what will have the desired effect on your desired audience.
Conclusion
Writing is hard for many reasons. Passion can carry the writer through those difficulties, and can also create its own difficulties. On the whole, I strongly recommend trying to find things that you do care about when you write, and to care about how well you write. But don’t let that passion close off the practical considerations that make it possible to complete projects and share your writing with others.
