"The Purposeful Writer: Creative Writing Meets the Golden Circle" by Soramimi Hanarejima (guest post)

I'm delighted to welcome Soramimi Hanarejima back to the blog. Soramimi is intensely interested in the how, why, and what of creativity. His first post, "Where Creativity Meets Productivity," explored the How: natural tendencies, rhythms, and habits that writers can foster to maximize productivity during our writing time. In this post, he explores the advantages to articulating our Why for writing.

The Purposeful Writer: Creative Writing Meets the Golden Circle

by Soramimi Hanarejima

It can feel like as writers we go where inspiration and curiosity lead us, to the vistas craft can take us. Purpose, then, could seem transcendent or irrelevant. Yet a sense of purpose, whether majestic or mundane, can be essential to a writer as a way to focus on producing more meaningful work. But how do we go about identifying and enacting purpose in our creative work?

When it comes to leading a purposeful life and pursuing meaningful endeavors, Simon Sinek’s Start With Why is full of insightful and actionable perspectives that can structure how we approach our work. Central to this book is The Golden Circle, a framework that aligns and integrates motivation, action and outcomes—the Why, How and What:

• Why we do the activities we feel are meaningful.
• How we act upon that motivation. 
• What we we ultimately produce, the outcome of enacting the motivation. 

Here’s how The Golden Circle might look when applied to creative writing:
Clarity of Why: Why do you write? What deep purpose drives you to tell stories?
Discipline of How: How do you act upon that purpose? How do you strive to accomplish this vital calling?
Consistency of What: How do you maintain a high level of quality in what you are creating as a writer?

The last blog post I wrote for Sione focused on the Discipline of How, and this one addresses the Clarity of Why.

Guest post: Where Creativity Meets Productivity by Soramimi Hanarejima

Today I'm thrilled to bring you a guest post by Soramimi Hanarejima, who writes amazing short speculative fiction that takes abstract concepts and gives them physical form (e.g. the man who goes on a city-wide search for his creativity) and blends the mental and emotional aspects of human experience. His first collection of short stories has been accepted for publication by Montag Press Collective.

Over the past several months, Soramimi and I have been sending each other reading recommendations and resources to enhance creativity, and that's where the idea for this blog post - and two more that will be coming in the next few months - came from. Soramimi is intensely interested in the how, why, and what of creativity. This first post addresses the how, the coming posts the why and the what.

Where Creativity Meets Productivity

by Soramimi Hanarejima

You have now begun to walk in the open space of the page. The journey becomes an elaborate series of gambles, and there is no forward progression as such; there is shaping and reconfiguring, stepping backing, inking in and beginning over.—David Morley

Creative writing can be messy. There can be countless ideas, aspirations, doubts and dizzying decisions to be made regarding plot development, tone, the psychology of characters and much more. Research beckons, the urge to outline flares up or gets suppressed, scenes spring to mind, scuffles between spontaneity and structure erupt. There are so many facets of craft to grapple with.

Then again, writing is on some level about getting work done, about creating a product. So while I love discussions about craft and activities that hone our literary sensibilities, the resources that have been most valuable to me recently are books, podcasts and talks that deal with the pragmatics of being productive as a creative individual, of carving out time and space and practices to fill that time and space in the service of accomplishing meaningful work. Here are my favorites, the ones that keep me coming back for their effective frameworks and processes.