Why We Write

Haven't we all started a novel at some point or another? Maybe a few pages, or maybe even a few chapters?

I started writing a novel a few years ago and picked it up again recently after a sudden spark of inspiration. Will anything ever come of it? Will I ever finish it? I wish I knew.

I am having so much fun writing that the words are just pouring out of me. Page after page, I just keep writing, sometimes backtracking to remember a minor character's name, or to fix a grammar mistake, but writing is never as hard when you do it, as it seems when you think about it.

I am learning a lot about myself as I work on my little fantasy/romance novel. I am learning that it is entirely impossible to create a character that is not in some way a version of your own personality. So that sheds a huge spotlight on all of the authors of the hundreds of books I have read.

Writing is intensely personal. I can't really picture myself allowing any of my family members to read my book, because they know too much about me already. I might show my book to a couple of my closest friends, but I know they won't judge me and they enjoy reading some of the same genres of books as I do.

Why do we write?

We write to live a life we can't have. To meet that person we haven't met yet. To experience those things that we don't want to admit that we want.

We write to not feel lonely. To live in a time and place where debt and bad knees and food allergies never happened. To have the things we don't have the space for. To have the job we really want. To have that one person who knows exactly what we need and when we need it.

We write to feel free.
We write to feel a little better.
We write because we want to escape into a book that has everything we ever asked for.