Now the fun begins, discover your why?

Hello again,
Well the competition is now closed and thanks and best wishes go to all who entered. Thank you also for all the birthday good wishes. I maybe only 50 and a couple of days but it feels good, so maybe 50 is a new beginning.

Your entries are now with the Judges and as soon as I receive the results they will be posted on here, so watch this space.

Some great entries, wish I could give a prize to all but then that would not be much of a competition if everyone received a prize. Do you remember when schooling became all PC and no one could lose. I don't know about you but it felt like we had become cheated somehow, not me personally, schooling in my day was not politically correct. We were taught that healthy competition was good for you but we were also taught it was equalling as important to take part.

It seems these days in some schools of thought there can be no winners or losers, well I am not getting poetical here as I do not think my blog is a place to share my political views. If there was no winners or losers, everyone was to be equal, how would that effect the Olympics for example?

What are your thoughts?

Do you think competition is healthy? or unfair?

As writers we are in an extremely competitive market, millions of new books every year, new authors discovered. Does that discourage you or encourage you?

What gives you your passion to write when there is so much competition?

What drives you to add more words to your work in progress, to build your author's platform?

In short what motivates you to do what we do everyday?

I can only answer for myself on this point, and no its not money, if it was I may have given up as many writers do, the unfinished work stuck in a drawer somewhere, forgotten. No money is a nice to have, for many writers if they were to rely solely on there writing to pay the bills, many would have given up long ago. For most, will need that  day job! I don't but it still not my driving force, maybe if it was I would write more, blog more, get more done!

My motivation is the stories in my head, I want to make sense of them, I want to share them, with my non-fiction I want to help my readers. If it is from the pain they suffer each day, a health tip, cholesterol whatever it is my motivation in my non fiction is to engage change by empowering my readers with information. In my fiction is where I sometimes struggle, because what is a great story to me maybe not so great for others, so I need to find another motivation for my fiction. My driver at the moment is that I never leave something incomplete, it may take me longer to get to the end goal but I will finish what I start.

So if you take one thing away from my blog today, what is your motivation to keep writing?

If you can honestly answer that for yourself, what your driver is, what keeps you going when all you really want is to hit the delete button!! Write it out if necessary, put it somewhere where you can see it easily, remind yourself daily to keep your why alive.

For some people they may need a visual aid to remind them of their why? Their motivation? Their drive?

If that is you, find a picture of it and keep it close. If your sole motivation is money and for many it will be, we all need to pay bills and eat but apart from letters from the bank manager it is not very exciting. So if your driver is money, or success, how do you measure you have achieved it? What do you want to do with it, once you have it?

Once you are earning enough from your writing it maybe to give up the day job, it maybe to buy a better house, lifestyle? What is your dream, discover what your why is and you will have a stronger motivation to continue writing.

Happy writing everyone. Watch this space for the short stories to be posted in next few days.