What is a Writer’s Compelling?

Is writing about making money or is writing about communicating a message? Writing is not all about making money, creating a name for yourself, or building a following. I think not.Those things are part of the deal but not the most important element.   

Writing is about passion. It’s about having something to say that is worth saying, that the writer believes has merit and meaning. It has an objective. Writing is communicating big ideas in carefully crafted wordings. Writing is speaking with a musicality endearing to the reader, causing them to want more. Writing with substance is to take writing to a level of purposed endeavor which will influence and create something with value for its intended audience.  I believe if we only write to make money, then we have missed the point of the greater reason.

If it is only about dollars and cents, writing will be of a temporary quality with little lasting value. Cranking out volumes of text to print for this purpose only–to pay the bills–in itself is not what writing, in its pure form, is about. Writing which captures ideas to bring them to life, and incorporates understanding of human foibles, errors and triumphs, will endure and become legendary. 

The test of time will sift the wheat from the chaff. Time showcases the people who know how to write, to spill their guts, to make language speak in ways people can hear whereby causing the cream to rise to the top. Real writing has something to say that is worth saying, if not for others at least for one’s self.                                                                 

Great writers write because their voices refuse to be silent. The fire burns within them. Some writers did their writing from prison cells where they languished for their beliefs of no compromise nor deliverance. Thoughts came to them in the quietness of the hidden place behind walls of darkness. There, some of the greatest works blossomed within the harshness of their crucible. The spirit within them would not die nor would they disbelieve in the greater good that could be accomplished if the truth were released from out of the bowels of their tomb.

Some authors’ works speak louder in today’s world than in the day in which they were written. Tolkien, Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, Bunyan, the apostle Paul, Saint John, Merton and Chesterton, to name a few, had much to say that came out of lives bound to a greater purpose. The world is a better place, richer in dimension, because of their contributions.

Passion and writing are like hand in glove, one needs the other to make it work. Writing is the observation of the nuances of language and emotions of life, showing the spirit of the spiritual and evil of the diabolical, coming together in an on-going clash of plot and message, teaching through subliminal message and characterization through carefully constructed plots which weave the very essence of life and living.  

Writers write like sculptors sculpt. They release the image through the uniting of their soul with the material at hand by seeing the hidden message found in beauty or distress and by means of expression with unexpected and unusual clarity. Their words take us to the place, emotion, belief, or conflict. Our eyes see through their words.

Why do you like to write?