Some Comments from Stephen Kelner

A while back I chatted about Stephen P. Kelner's Motivate Your Writing! (Two posts: here and here.) He dropped through the comment trail, and I thought what he had to say was entertaining enough to share. So, without further commentary from me:

Hi, folks --

happened to Google myself (probably a side effect of too much Power motive) and found a recent reference to my several-year-old book, which was a nice surprise. Thanks for the shout-out, David, and a pretty pithy summary of the motives, too. For the record, it was a working title (exclamation point and all), and my editor kept it. I expected him to change it, to be honest. Who am I to question?

Just FYI, the standard deviation -- average variation around the mean -- for Activity Inhibition is 0.25, which means anyone with 18 is beyond the beyond as far as the ability to channel or manage their motives, even if you are teddibly British. (I've had opportunities to work with a lot of Brits over the years, and having 18 would still qualify you by a mammoth margin, I think.)

One reason I wrote this, David, was because even experienced award-winning writers get stuck sometimes, and because motives are nonconscious, they may not know what to do about it or why it happened. (It's all in the book, as you know.) One writer who was already pretty productive told me she got more so after I advised her on her motives, so that's not bad either. (She tweaked her writing group practices.)

By the way, I finally broke academic habit and started referring to the Power motive as the Influence motive, which is much more neutral. All three names really suck, and David McClelland, the genius who really made this research live, used to complain about that all the time. Such is academia.

Best,
Steve Kelner (still on LiveJournal, LinkedIn)

Thanks, Steve.