Inspiration vs. Motivation

Hello dear reader, and welcome back to my blog! This past week has been quite the experience for me, and as a result, I’m feeling inspired! But what exactly is inspiration, and how can we utilize it to grow in our writing?

Inspiration is the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something creative or important. When we feel inspiration, we get new ideas and a renewed motivation for our creative projects. A lot of creatives, like writers, artists, and musicians, depend on inspiration to get them through their projects. But if we want to become professionals at what we do and make a career out of our passions, we’ll need much more than inspiration!

Motivation is one of the most crucial elements of being a creative. If you aren’t motivated to be creative, you won’t be able to get much of anything done. Now a lot of people might ask, “How am I supposed to stay motivated on a project without inspiration to get me excited about it?” Think about it this way: Motivation is what drives us. It’s what made us decide to take on this project in the first place, and it’s what will continue to push us forward until the project is completed. Inspiration is simply a way to saturate your mind with ideas and emotions that will help feed your desire to work on your project. But without motivation, inspiration has no effect.

This is something I struggle with myself to this day. I’ll try to get super inspired to work on a project, but without the proper motivation, I’m left scrolling through my collages and character art while listening to playlist after playlist. Without motivation, your method of inspiration could actually be a distraction, which is the exact opposite of what we want to accomplish!

But what if we’re stuck on a project and don’t feel like doing anything to make progress on it?

Finding inspiration might help, but what we really need first is to examine our motivation.

Motivation isn’t finite, like inspiration. You don’t need to constantly be in search of more. Instead, motivation is like a well. We can draw from it again and again in order to push ourselves to complete a task. But sometimes we can get a bit lost. Sometimes we lose track of where that well is, and so our motivation for a project slowly fades. But if this project is truly something you want to complete, that motivation will never disappear entirely. You just need to find that well again.

But how? And where? It’s all in your “why”. Think about why you began this project in the first place. What do you aim to accomplish through it? Who do you want to impact with it? How will you serve others through completing it? By thinking about these things and truly considering the answers, you may find that your motivational well is closer than you think.

Now, let’s see where inspiration comes into this. After all, inspiration can be a valuable tool to boost your productivity and excitement– when used in the proper way! Let’s go back to the well example. In the well, the water is just that: water. But inspiration is like adding a fun fruit flavoring to that water! Flavored water tastes better than normal water, but both are still good sources of hydration. But if you were only to use inspiration to try to motivate yourself, that would be like trying to drink straight powdered flavoring! Ew! Motivation should be your main way of “hydrating” your creative energy, but when you need a little boost, consider adding some flavor to your motivational well through inspiration!

Motivation and inspiration are both important when tackling a creative project, like writing a book. Oftentimes, you’ll lose your motivation in the middle of that project, or if you’re like me, several times throughout it! But that doesn’t mean it’s lost forever.

Think about a different kind of well– the well that never runs dry. I know that I have been called by God to honor Christ through Story, and if I draw from that calling, my motivational well will never run dry, either! God will always be there for you in whatever stage of life you’re in, and you can always call on Him for help. When you are in search of motivation, remember that Jesus is the living water, the well that will never run dry.

“A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

John 4: 7-14

See you among the shelves,

Emma G. McKee

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