About the writer’s motivation

Someone here asked me about the motivation of a writer. Charles Bukowski is worth reading in this context:

“When I think of all the things I endured trying to be a writer — all those rooms in all those cities, when I chewed crumbs of food that wouldn’t feed a rat.

I was so skinny you could cut bread with my spatula, except I rarely had bread….. and meanwhile I wrote things over and over on bits of paper.

And when I moved from one place to another, my cardboard suitcase looked like this: paper on the outside, stuffed with paper on the inside.

Every new landlady would ask, “what do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“о…”

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/

As I settled into tiny rooms to indulge in my craft, many of them took pity on me, feeding me morsels like apples, walnuts,
peaches. a lot of them knew that was pretty much all I had to eat.
But all their pity ended when they discovered I had bottles of cheap wine. It’s okay to be a starving writer, but not a starving writer who drinks. Drunkards are never forgiven anything. But when the world is about to finish you off quickly a bottle of wine seems like a very reasonable friend.

Ah, all those landladies, by most accounts heavy, slow, their husbands long deceased, I can still see these darlings crawling up and down the stairs of their world.

They crippled my very existence: if they wouldn’t let me live for an extra week without paying now and then, I’d be on the street, and I couldn’t WRITE on the street.
It was important to have a room, a door, those walls. Oh, those dark mornings in those beds, listening to their footsteps, listening to their coughs, hearing the flush of their toilets, smelling their food being prepared, while waiting for some word of the dispatches to New York and the whole world,
my dispatches to those educated, intelligent, snobbish, innately formal, comfortable people there.

They truly took the time to say, no.

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/

Yes, in dark beds with flatmates rustling around, hanging around idly and spying, sharpening kitchen utensils,
I often thought of those editors and publishers who did not recognize what I was trying to say in my own way, in my own special way, and I thought they must be wrong.
That thought was followed by another, much worse than the first: maybe I’m the fool: almost every writer thinks they write exceptional work. That’s
normal. It’s okay to be a fool.

And after that, I’d get out of bed, find a piece of paper, and start writing again.”

So there you go. Ask yourself the question, what makes quite a few people live sometimes absolutely miserable lives, choosing art (for everything Bukowski mentioned can be rightly attributed to any creator)? Refusing to choose the familiar, the more or less bread-and-butter?

I’ve talked about this with many more or less successful people who are not creators, and they genuinely don’t understand. Such voluntary asceticism is beyond their comprehension. It is beyond their comprehension.
However, it is possible to restate this question in an even meaner manner.

Read no further.

What is it that creators get from their work, something so powerful that they choose to continue to create, despite the fact that it is apparently the last thing that can give well-being?

What is it, something that creators have and that everyone else is deprived of? Should creators feel sorry for ordinary people who are deprived of something most important?
And why the richest and most influential people in the world are willing to pay incredible money, to support creators, just to touch, to feel a sense of belonging to …. Touch what? To be in the aura of what? Something you can’t spare any money for? Because there’s no other way to get close to it? If you can’t.

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/