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Why do you Write?

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Why do you write?

Do you just have a burning desire to put pen to paper, or find something therapeutic in the act of typing?  Do you have dreams of writing the Great American Novel?  Do you yearn to see your name on the Best-Seller's List, and long for the day when you can write full-time? Is there a message you want to get out to the World, and you want to use your writing as a Vehicle of Change?  Are your characters an adult version of imaginary friends, and you just like spending time with them?  Maybe you are just an avid reader, and saw writing as the next logical step?

I have been thinking about this sort of thing recently as I realize more and more that my hobbies far outweigh my available time, so I'm curious what you all, the aspiring and accomplished both, have to say on the matter.



For me, its just that I have these ideas that I love to develop.  Worlds, Systems (magic or otherwise), stories, and scenes are always bouncing around in my head, and I desperately want a good way to express them, to share them.  I don't really have any larger ambitions than that.  I'm an engineer at heart (and at work :P), so my life's ambitions are in a completely different field.  And when you get down to it, I find most of the available methods of actual writing (typing, pen&paper, etc) somewhat tedious and cumbersome.   The day vocal dictation software is good enough to flow conversationally with anything close to proper punctuation is probably the day Ill stop touching the keyboard.  Hell, Ive even played with an EEG headset in the vague hopes of being able to control my computer more directly for creative works (an abysmal failure I assure you  :-\ ).   The truth is, if I could find a ghostwriter willing to work with me to record and polish my ideas into an actual manuscript, without needing thousands of dollars up front, I would be set and happy. 

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
Because I can't not write, basically. Given which, I'd certainly like to make some money from it; I wouldn't say I yearn for the day I can write full-time, because the odds of that seem too small for me to get worked up about, but it would certainly be nice not to have to worry about a day job. I don't write because I have a Message (that's what telegrams are for, or were anyway), but I suspect that my fiction probably conveys a fair bit of what I care about as ways to live &c. (Though taking my narrators as reliable indicators of my beliefs would not be a good idea in general; I'm not particularly interested in doing that, because it would be boring.)

LizW65:
Because its the best way to make the voices in my head go away?
 :)
In all seriousness, I have a ton of different characters and scenes playing out inside my head at any given time, and my options are:
(a) wait for another, established author to come up with something similar, or
(b) do it myself exactly as I want.

Aminar:
I write because I like to entertain.  Because it is easily the most lucrative skill I have and I would love to make money off of it if for no other reason than I have family land that my current career path will not allow me to help take care of.  I think most importantly I write to pay back the writers that made me who I am.  I owe so much of my personal strength, charisma, and nature to literature it isn't even funny.  I've done a great many things to give back some of that.  I've worked with kids for a long time because it's a way to give back, but my audience has always been small.  Writing is a way to help more kids get to where I am(although not the most reliable one, as I know few people take as many of the lessons learnable from literature and use them the way I have.

My biggest selfish reason to write is that I can't get enough of the kind of literature I want.  But I can write it, and as a discovery writer that process is much like reading a book, but longer and more fulfilling.

trboturtle:
I write because I read.....

A good story takes me away -- away from my wories, my frustration, and the other things that I don't want to think about. And I realized that I could do the same thing when I write. I can pour some of the negative emotion into characters and situation, and joy too.

From that, I felt the need to write. First with pen and paper, then a typewriter, then a computer. Fanfiction at first, but I've grown to start creating my own universes my own worlds to explore.

I realize that in some way I'm passing the gift on to someone else -- to take them away from their own worries and stress. ANd if I can do that, I've done my job...

Craig

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