What are you passionate about?
I will say this, when I’m passionate about something I go in Well more than 100%. It’s probably why I’ve burnt out on a lot of stuff.
Let’s see, there was the tennis phase followed by fishing and hunting, karate, competitive bike, racing and let’s not forget a bunch of mini stuff that happened between.
I did learn the lesson about passion when I was working. If you could find someone that was passionate about a subject, you didn’t need to motivate them. It was there all along.
Delusions of Adequacy 
Writing. Compulsive about it. Love to put words through adventure, discovery, close-order drill, and interpretive dance in all possible situations, climates, areas, and levels.
Sonnets, dramas, essays, expositions, narrations, vers libre, even haiku. Produce articles, comments, short stories, novelettes, even lyrics for popular melodies.
So far around 3 full-blown novels (more than 50,000 words), half a dozen novelettes, 20 or 30 short stories, a hundred poems, and innumerable essays on a variety of topics. VERY few in print, and fewer still brought me any profit.
Allow characters in my longer stories to develop naturally in reaction to whatever problems they encounter. More often than not they manage to tell me things about myself that I was only vaguely aware of, such as attitudes about love, marriage, family, ethics, morals, politics, violence, religion, government, education . . . .
What normally happens with the stories (as opposed to the essays and blog comments) is that I dash them off quickly, often in less than a week, and then put them away for a while. It’s a hobby, of course, like guys who build boats in their basements that they’ll never sail — I write things that no one will ever read.
After a few months I drag ’em out and view ’em as an unsuspecting reader would, fully qualified to analyze, criticize, modify, or discard. Often my main characters expose my biases, prejudices, unawareness, and other flaws.
In years before word processors, I’d take the annoying or troubling text to the back yard and burn it, page by page, in a large barrel or fire pit . . . very cathartic, therapeutic, illuminating, relaxing. Today it’s a matter of dredging things up from archives and hitting “Delete.”
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impressive, writing isn’t easy, especially books.
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