Back in October, I wrote about staying motivated as a creator when you have little audience and no income from your work.

I touched on the “lottery ticket” mentality—keeping at it because you still have a chance—and the personal rewards of self-expression. But I ended with a rather stiff conclusion about persistence being key to success.

That was logical enough.

You have to stay in the game to have a chance to win. If you drop out that chance is gone.

But logic has its limits. In the years since, I’ve had to focus less on external validation and more on the internal rewards of creativity: how to keep that itch—(or flame, if you want to be poetic about it)—alive when you can’t get traction with an audience, when you don’t have resources to market, or when the quality simply isn’t there yet.

So let me try to go deeper: Why should you keep writing, painting, making music, or pursuing whatever your creative endeavor is, when there’s no traction and no money? Not just because “you have to stay persistent.” That may not always be enough.

The Itch Is Usually Enough—Until It Isn’t

I’ve said before that I write because I can’t not write.

There’s a core drive in me to write—or tell stories—an itch I have to scratch as often as I can.

If you’re reading this, you likely have that same itch. This post isn’t about whether you have the drive to create; it’s about what to do to keep it alive through thick and thin, year in and year out, when you have few external results to motivate you.

Or to put it more bluntly: Is having an itch enough when life pressures you and you feel like giving up?

Because life happens. You have roles and responsibilities. If you’ve followed me for a while, you know we have a special needs son who takes up 90% of our waking time and often the nights as well. But it could be anything for you: illness, family crisis, job loss, financial struggle. These things drain the energy and joy from your life—including the energy to create.

Is the itch enough then?

It can be, until a certain point. It’s like sex drive—you don’t usually have to think about it. It’s just there, enough to keep you going under most circumstances. But as any adult knows, if you’re stressed enough or distracted enough, that drive diminishes. Once it becomes a chore—because there’s so much else you have to push aside to make time for it—the desire fades. You have to actively work to maintain it, or that flame could die out altogether.

When the Flame Dies: A Cautionary Tale

I have a personal example regarding another creative activity I lost but which I used to do constantly: drawing. I thought I’d never stop. I even had a small audience.

As a teenager and until the mid-1990s, I was part of a group that made a Star Wars comic—the remnant of an old Danish fan club. We had permission from Lucasfilm to continue as a non-profit fan project. We sent it out to about 50-60 people, and I loved it. I had a powerful drive to draw and tell stories, even working on my own original comics.

Then I got older. The comic closed because we all developed other interests. But more importantly, the reality of the market hit me. Print comics were becoming a dying industry except for manga, and the internet was just beginning to change everything. I saw fewer opportunities to make a career as a comic artist and gave up that dream—but vowed to continue privately.

Then university happened. Illness. Life. My friends from the Star Wars days drifted to other things. And despite my strong drive, drawing slowly stopped. Not just comics—all of it. I still doodle occasionally, but rarely.

This is one of my big regrets. I loved drawing. But my current life as a special needs dad in a small apartment that’s always messy and noisy doesn’t help rekindle that drive. I can write short stories by dictating them on my phone during my bus commute. It’s harder to draw when you can’t really do it at home.

So I’ve lost that, probably for good. Even though the drive was very strong for many years, it wasn’t enough. And now it has died out.

Protecting Your Flame

This brings me to what keeps the creative flame alive and how we can protect it. Your experience may vary depending on who you are and what you create, but I believe there are commonalities worth examining.

Above all, remember that creativity helps you make sense of the world. We often do this unconsciously. A musician friend recently released an album after losing both parents within a short span. He wrote songs about it—not as therapy exactly, but because that’s what he does. It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. Songwriters know that even a small problem can become a great song. If you journal, you’re already doing this: reflecting on what happened to make sense of it emotionally.

For me, writing stories helps me process our life as a special needs family. I believe our experiences with stress, illness, and challenged children can help others, even if they’re not in the exact same situation. Not all my stories are about that, but almost all contain some slice of my life experience.

If someone finds one of my stories—whether I have 5 readers or 5,000—and can make use of it, that matters. But even if they don’t, writing it out brings me peace and better understanding. I don’t need a massive audience for that.

Realizing that your work is a direct help for you to be in the world is perhaps the most important flame, the one I hinted at in my original post. It is also what, as I think I have mentioned before, keeps me sane in my daily life because it is the only place where I can really be “my self”. That’s what I always have to remind myself of—this value—when I feel I am about to lose the inner drive.

But there are other ways to keep that creative fire burning.

Practical Strategies

Here are other approaches that help me sustain my creative drive:

Let go of outcomes and play. If you’re creating without getting paid or seen, the drive must feel positive—never like a chore. If you “play around” with an idea and it doesn’t result in a concrete product, that’s fine. Give yourself permission to create without publishing. The play itself is valuable.

Ignore the “hustle” culture and enjoy the process. In indie publishing, we’re told to work fast, stop seeking perfection, and just produce. “Don’t take ten years to write a book.” But what if you find joy in crafting at the sentence level? What if the most poignant expression of a thought is what brings you satisfaction? If you’re a poet, painter, or songwriter, this is exactly what you want. But it’s true for fiction writers and bloggers too. Sit with it. Nurture your sentences. If you spend a whole day on one paragraph and it keeps your motivation alive, isn’t that time well spent?

Revisit your previous work. When I read a story I’m proud of, it almost always gives me energy—sometimes enough to start something new. I know many professionals say, “I just write it and move on,” but for those of us not writing for a paycheck, savoring the work is part of the reward. Allow yourself this pleasure.

Make creativity a constant, even in small doses. When I couldn’t draw at home, I couldn’t sustain it. But I can dictate stories on my phone during my commute. Find the format and time that works within your constraints. Five minutes of creative work is infinitely better than zero.

Connect with even one person who gets it. You don’t need thousands of readers. One person who genuinely appreciates what you’re making can be enough to remind you why it matters. Seek out that connection, even if it’s just one friend or one reader who occasionally comments.

Summing up

I want to be clear: I believe audience and income are important for most of us, myself included. Of course we want to be read, seen, heard, and paid. But when those external validators aren’t there or are weak, you have to look at what could motivate you to create today just for the sake of it.

Take time to identify what your creative drive consists of—what specifically keeps your flame alive. Here are mine, distilled:

1. Processing my life experience through stories
2. The hope that my work might help someone, even one person
3. The satisfaction of crafting a single perfect sentence or paragraph
4. The energy I get from rereading my best work
5. The act of creation as a form of resistance against a chaotic life

What are yours? Make your own list of five specific triggers that can help you sustain your creative practice even when you’re stressed and pressed—things that have nothing to do with money, audience, or even the hope of future success.

Realizing that creativity can be a sanctuary and support through anything life throws at you is one of the strongest motivators. It should never be just a hustle, because then the itch might become a rash, and the flame might go out entirely.

What keeps you going?

So … this post focuses on understanding your internal motivations, but there are of course many other dimensions worth exploring: finding creative community (though I’ll be honest—that’s hard), using constraints productively, creating rituals that trigger your creative mode, giving yourself permission to switch mediums, and the challenge of protecting creative time when life demands everything from you. Just to name a bunch on top of my head … 

What else keeps you going that I haven’t mentioned (or that I have)? Let me know in the comments—your input might shape the next post.

— Chris

P.S. No new stories will be listed in this post!

I have a handful (8-10) shorter and longer pieces in various stages of production, which I guess is also a consequence of me just going at it and starting off whatever was on my mind and I had time and energy for—without worrying too much about whether or not I finished. In short, playing around. 

But I have needed that since I quit writing the novel, because of the usual stress. There have been the usual caretaking of my son, daily housekeeping and some recurring health issues (nothing serious but it … uses bandwidth), and a bunch of other things, that have made it hard for me to do anything but just play as much as I could to keep the flame alive, even if the results have been scattershot. 

But at least I am following my own advice 🙂

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Photo by Camilo Goes on Unsplash