Passionately making meaning

This week I've been working my way through Eric Maisel's book Coaching the Artist Within.  Maisel is a creativity coach who works with writers, painters, musicians, and other creatives all around the world.

The topic that caught my attention was the idea of 'passionately making meaning'.  And the suggestion that really got me interested was the idea that making meaning should start with an examination of our life purposes.  He says that "coming up with one life purpose will probably not be enough".  "It turns out that a person who feels really alive has several life purposes in mind," he says.  "These multiple life purposes fit together seamlessly into a composite."

I've always had a problem trying to combine my differing life purposes in my writing.  The novels I've written over the years have simply taken a story I wanted to tell about a character who interested me.  But over the last couple of years I've felt a shift in the way I view my work.

Now I've begun to see how to weave the things I care about into a coherent whole in my work.  For many years I avoided making my work 'political' in any way.  I was a simple storyteller.  But the trouble with that is that you end up with a story which entertains well enough, but does nothing to challenge  its readers.  It does nothing to make them think, to see another point of view.  I had kept the 'passionate' part out of my creating.

Eric. Maisel is saying that it is vital to "passionately act to fulfil your life purposes."  But he also talks about "the risks associated with passionate meaning-making".  This is the other big decision every creative person must make.  Our meaning is personal to each of us, and for me there are still some aspects of who I am and what I believe that I am not willing to make public.

Still, even without that extreme form of personal exposure, there are enough of my life purposes that I am willing to go public with.  Weaving these disparate passions together into one coherent whole has taken a great deal of time and reflection to do.  But now I have a sense of how it can be done.

Passionately making meaning for me means getting my characters to articulate their beliefs, and giving them issues that I want them to work through to get my point across.  And going back to my work to add these elements has deepened it enormously.  Passionately making meaning works.