I have a long-form fiction project I’d like to discuss for a moment. Let’s call it Fabula. (Fabula is Latin for story.) When I’m working on Fabula I enjoy it very much. I enjoy the discoveries I make as I cobble it together and the connections inside the story that are generated. The characters, especially the protagonist, have me hooked. The writing really clicks. This could all be interpreted as a reason to stay with the project, evidence Fabula has legs.

But there’s an issue. A nagging, always present, issue.

I am missing an underlying motivation for Fabula. I don’t know why I’m writing it. I don’t know what question I’m seeking to answer, what curiosity I’m exploring.

Completing a novel is a great deal of work. The project must create fire-in-the-belly for the writer. The micro-delights I’m experiencing will occur with any project and can’t take the place of the story’s reason for existence. Any confusion on the author’s part of a crush (being enamored with the daily writing) and commitment (the depth of underlying, long-lasting, motivation for a project) will be sniffed out by the reader and impact their experience as well. A reader can tell when the author found this deeper purpose in creating a manuscript. They can also sense a missing core. Such energy (or lack of it) translates. As always, the reader’s experience comes of the author’s.