Hickey (2003), taking a "stridently sociocultural" position on motivation, notes that conceptualizations of motivation must shift to successfully study "motivation-in-context" (p. 401 ). This study represents an attempt to navigate such a shift. Rather than taking established understandings of achievement goals and motivation orientations as given, this interview-based, qualitative analysis examines three creative writing environments--a secondary classroom, an extracurricular arts program, and an online game community--and analyzes adolescent participants' understandings of their writing goals and motivations to write in particular settings. While such an approach relies on self-report and thus cannot capture implicit cognitions, its goal is to shed light on relationships among writers, contexts, and cognitions--and how traditional motivational paradigms may need to be amended to engage with such questions.