Passion and Writing
What I have discovered about writing over the years is that, at least for me, writing is pathetically easy when I have passion. When I have passion, I find no shortage of things to write about, the quality of my writing is better, and the quantity of my writing is greater. I don’t know if I would be considered an “A” blogger (i.e. high-quality), but I get a sense of the quality of my blog by the feedback I get either by direct comments or links/trackbacks I get.
When I wrote my second book, I can tell you that the quality of the book suffered–and the sales statistics on this book bore this out. The reason? I lost my passion for the subject matter about half-way through the process. It was very hard to finish writing the book. The quality of the book was not as good. I can also look back over my past blog entries–something I’ve done recently–and I can tell when I had passion and when I didn’t.
The biggest problem I seem to have is maintaining that passion. At least with respect to my blog, I have passion right now. In general, it seems inconsistent in my life. It comes and goes. The focus of my passions changes, though I’m guessing it’s normal. When I have that passion, it drives me in ways nothing else can. I get stuff done, kick butt, and take names.
The real question is how can I find sustainable passion, whether it be for writing, technology, or something else. Writing and technology seem to be linked for me, I’m just not sure how it all combines together yet. Finding a long-term source of passion that combines these two things seems to be elusive. Somehow throwing a podcast-like thing in there would be cool too since I seem to have recurring thoughts about doing one.
I have more thoughts about this, but we’re recording a VoIP Think Tank podcast tomorrow morning and I should get some sleep.
