Creating passionate work

On my read-through of Eric Maisel's book 'Making Your Crearive Mark' this week I've come to the chapter he calls'The Passion Key'.  "Passion and its synonyms... enthusiasm, excitement, and energy, are vital to the creative process" he says.  "Opt for passionate work", he advises.

Which sounds simple.  We just follow what we love, and put it into our work.  But Maisel has some cautionary words for us.  "Understand the power of our cultural and societal injunctions against passion," he says.  "Those injunctions can easily stop you from expressing the passion you feel."  In other words, we feel reined in and constrained by the norm.

This has been my position with my environmentally-themed work for years. This "inhibition by cultural message", as he describes it, has led me to pull my punches, to be wary of talking about the elephant in the room, the overpopulation of Earth by humans.  "These cultural and societal injunctions can easily stop you from expressing the passion you feel," he says.  "It can feel very hard to go against the grain and act passionately in the service of your projects."  He is so right.

He provides an important clue to how to work passionately.  "Creating in our authentic voice produces and sustains passion," he says.  But this whole area of voice and passion is tricky for a quiet introvert.  Yes, I'm very clear about my beliefs and values these days, and they in turn inform my writing.  But often I've been reluctant to show these beliefs and my passion in my work up front.

This is changing with my current work in progress,  my two main characters are aromantic asexual sisters who have devoted their lives to conserving the natural world on a failing Earth.  They have strong views about what humans have done to destroy their world, and this time I've found it easy to write those views into the work in their voices.

This is partly me becoming willing to show the inner me on the page, and partly a need to more passionately advocate for these things.  "Something in you must ignite at least some of the time if your work is to feel alive and if you are to feel alive," Maisel says.

Maybe that's why I feel this novel really matters, because it passionately expresses things which I believe are vitally important for saving the Earth.