20 Reasons for Why I’m a Writer

What do you do when a friend of yours sends you a quote like this?:

“I can’t understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.”
― Fred Allen

(and no, my friend was not Fred Allen)

I do not understand this kind of theology. At all. So I wrote up a list of the reasons why I’ve decided to be a writer—to do it the “hard way” as Fred Allen implies it to be.

1. It’s fun.
2. It stimulates my brain.
3. It’s fun to come up with what will happen next.
4. I can develop better my daydreaming abilities.
5. I can create new worlds.
6. I can live in new worlds.
7. I can meet new people.
8. I can jump into other people’s brains.
9. I can make horrible things happen to people, and no one complains. (Wow…that sounds bad!! :))
10. What I’m writing has never been written before.
11. The first draft has so many possibilities—it’s fresh, original, inspiring, wonderful, and just a bit messy.
12. You could possibly earn money from it if you ever get published.
13. As soon as I set fingers to a keyboard, I know that what I write is all mine. Every little letter of it.
14. I can live in a world of dreams.
15. I can visit a place I’ve never been before, and enjoy myself immensely while I’m there.
16. I can use the most colossal, enormous, extensive, gigantic, humongous, immense, magnificent, mammoth, massive, monstrous, monumental, towering, tremendous, vast, behemothic, bulky, cyclopean, elephantine, immeasurable, jumbo, leviathan, mighty, monster, mountainous, oversized, planetary, prodigious, stupendous, titanic, walloping, whopping words when I write, or I could use the simplest. It’s all my decision.
17. I can use the license of being a writer and an author.
18. I love words.
19. I love being creative.
20. I love being an artist.

That is just a handful of the many reasons why I’m a writer. Why I take years to write a book. I understand that not all people have the time to write. Or have the ability or patience to write. Or mental strength. (I’m not saying I have all of those yet—but over all, I think those are some basic things you need to have to write.)

I write because I love to. Not because I’m necessarily good at it (I’m not), but because, like Jeremiah, I have a “fire in my bones”. A burning desire to get the story in my head out on paper (er, computer screen), where I can twist it and churn it and make it into something good. Something inspirational.

I think the ones that write quotes like that might be a bit lazy. Lazy in the fact that they’d rather someone else do all the hard work for them. But that would mean I’m lazy, too. Or impatient. I love writing, coming up with new characters, building new worlds in my mind, coming up with terrible problems for my characters to get through. I love it. But I, too, also like taking time off to just sit down and read a good book.

Being an author is hard. It’s also fun. And scary. And, yes, at some times we feel complete defeat. We feel like the story is going nowhere, as if it’s a broken down car way out in the boonies somewhere. It feels like we can never get out of that hole. Sometimes, it’s good to just take it easy. Take a break for a day, or an hour, or a minute or two. But after that break, we’ve got to push ahead. We can’t forever wait.

If you don’t know how to get from point A to point B then try to write down every possible solution there is to the problem. Then choose the craziest or the best fitting, and go on in the story. Grab a strong hold on the story world, and immerse yourself in it as best as possible. That’s a big plus of NaNoWriMo, especially if you’re doing around 30 – 50,000 words. You’re working so hard to get to the word goal that you just about have to be in the story world at all times. And that’s really good, because you can describe things 1,000x better.

But sometimes the story feels so bad that you’re sure you’ll never be able to make it good. I don’t really have any advice for there, really. When I faced that problem I just scrapped the entire plot (which really was so weak that was easy) and came up with a much stronger one. And I focused on the characters a lot more than the history.

I’d just like to encourage you, if any encouragement can be gained from that rather unkind quote—don’t give up. Keep writing. Maybe some people will end up buying and reading your book! You are an author. Don’t let anything tell you otherwise. And if it’s as hard to write as Allen implies (and I know it is), then you have even more reason to claim the title. Because you’re doing the hard work. It’s the kind of work that will pay off in the end.

Why do you write?
~Esther