August 16, 2023
I’ve often told anyone who
would listen that being a writer isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am. I look at
the world through a writer’s lens. My being a writer informs absolutely everything
about me as a human being. Everything I think, or do—every opinion, every choice,
and every emotion that I may claim—these all exist as they do because I am a
writer.
There is a lot of emotion in
my make-up and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about that. Of course, by
now I understand there is nothing I should do about that. If not for my
capacity to feel, I truly believe I would not be able to write—at least not in
the way that I do or even would want to do. In my opinion, the ability to
perceive and convey emotion is crucial to good storytelling.
It takes a lot of different
kinds of people to make a world, and it would be boring as hell if we were all
just carbon copies of one another. If you’re a writer, and if you write stories
about people and relationships, then you spend a lot of time studying people. You
want to know not just what, but why. You want to know the trail from there to
here. You want to know the deepest, darkest secrets, and you want to see how
many and varied ways there are to connect the dots.
That’s me. I want to present
characters to my reader who evoke emotion because when you evoke emotion in
your readers, they become invested in your work. If the reader doesn’t care
about the characters you create, they will not finish reading the book. And if
you write too many books where the readers don’t care, then the “prime motivation”
for the writer is lost.
The prime motivation for a
writer is to write so that others will read.
Now that sounds rather
obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s really not that obvious, nor is it always necessarily
the case. Over my career I have met different authors who write for many different
reasons. And sadly, not all of these authors even understand their own
motivation.
Some folks write because they
want to tell others the truth—so that they can stop being themselves and
start being who those authors think they should be.
Some folks write because they
want to vent their anger, their rage, and their sense of deep personal injustice—it’s
their way of shouting, “watch me, watch me! I matter!”
Some folks write to make money.
Now, this is a motivation I really don’t understand because (and I can say this
as the author of sixty-nine titles and counting published by my publisher)
there must be at least a million ways far easier to make money that to write.
When one is a writer, one willingly puts oneself through extreme torture from
time to time. It’s like every time you write a book, you are taking a knife and
eviscerating yourself and letting all that you are hang out there for everyone
to see and quite often, mock.
Who of sound mind would do
that? For money? One would have to be extremely desperate—and that same one
would eventually be extraordinarily disappointed, because except for the very
few rare cases, most published authors do not make a whole hell of a lot of
money. I guess it’s the same as those who chose the career of acting. Most
actors don’t necessarily even make a living wage.
It’s worse for writers than
for actors when it comes to earning their way. Who would sit down in front of a
blank computer screen and imagine that they could create a world, characters
and a story worth reading out of only what’s within them? Well, and to partly answer
my own question, I suppose that extreme narcissists would imagine that they
could and that the resulting work would be a page-turner. The key word in that
last sentence, of course, was “imagine”.
But otherwise, one might
expect that the true answer to that question of “why do it” might be that if one
has no friends and no life, one might indeed need to resort to such a thing if
only to quell the boredom.
Money doesn’t qualify as good enough
reason to go through what I go through to write a book. I may have my truths I
want to share, but I don’t ram them. I just reveal them and then leave it to the
reader whether to take it or not. As for the expression of pent-up emotions? Oh,
my friends, y’all should know by now there is nothing at all pent-up about my
emotions. They’ve had free rein over me for all my life.
When it comes to writing, for
me, it goes back to that prime motivating factor.
I write so that others will
read. And in the process, I hope the reader will find a few moments of
entertainment, that they will recognize something that is relatable for them,
and that when they finish the book, they will feel just a bit better than when
they began to read it.
One reader once told me that
reading my books was like having their heart hugged. And really, what could be
a better reward than that?
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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