i love to write essay

Writing like a Boss

From the desk of Samantha R. Uhrig

7 Reasons I LOVE to Write (and 2 Reasons You Should, Too)

Hello, writers, and happy Valentine’s Day! Today we’re going over one of my favorite topics of all time: loving your writing. I wrote about it in May 2017 , which is my most favorite post to date. (You can check out it out as a sequel to this one!)

But instead of some ways to love your writing, today I’m going to share some reasons why  I  love to write. Because it’s healthy to remind yourself why you do what you do! It keeps you focused, and helps you stay dedicated to your work. And at the bottom of this post, there will be two reasons why you,  too, should love your writing. The point of my list is to inspire your own, so you can finish your novel or screenplay ASAP!

Okay, let’s get on with it, shall we?

Note: point 3 has been edited in the written post, so the paragraph is said differently in the video.

An almost unnecessary little note: in this video, I wore bubblegum-pink jeans to make up for my black shirt. I’m kinda disappointed it wasn’t actually shown, so just pretend for me.

7 REASONS I LOVE TO WRITE

1. because i can create anything in my wildest imagination..

This is why I write fantasy as a means of relaxing, or even as a comfort when I’m feeling low. Suspension of disbelief is how fiction is possible!

Suspension of disbelief, otherwise  sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment , enables readers to leave behind what they’ve learned from the real world to lose themselves in a work of pure fiction. This is how you can watch Star Wars without saying, “But that’s impossible! There’s no such thing as the Force!”

Because suspension of disbelief exists, I as the writer have the freedom to put to page whatever my mind conjures, and someone can read it without thinking it unusual. A marvelous concept, isn’t it?

2. Because the words are a comfort.

When I’m feeling unwell, I write. It’s so natural, I didn’t even realize my unconscious habit till recently.

But I’m careful to write something separate from my main project , or else it just creates more stress and problems. I’ll look up some writing- or character-prompts online, and create a new story from there. It’s even more relaxing on paper. They’re rarely finished, but  so  helpful for when I need to chill!

3. Because I want to leave my mark on the world.

I don’t know what the world will know of me in a hundred years. I intend to write many books and manuscripts in my lifetime, but how much of an impact will they make? Will I be a bestselling classic? A local hero? A name passed through the family? All but forgotten to the public? Only God knows (which is quite a comfort!).

The way I see it, the more stories I write, and the more I improve with each one, the better I’ll be remembered for my dedication. And if it’s just my parents, grandparents, and siblings – as well as my husband, children, grandchildren, etc. – who are proud of me and know who I am, it’s enough! I’m so thrilled for my future family to read all the projects on which I will have worked so hard. That is the ultimate motivation for me.

4. Because I love to inspire others.

This is why I blog, specifically. I absolutely  adore  the idea of inspiring even just one person to follow his or her passion, writing or otherwise, and this is one of the biggest reasons why I write!

Namely, I want to inspire young writers out there. I’m fairly young myself, which I’m slow to admit, I’ll confess, but I think this gives me a particular advantage at this point in my life. Young writers will look at my blog, my books, my business, and everything I’m building every day, and they’ll say to themselves, “If she can do this, maybe I can, too!”

I won’t be young forever, but I don’t believe my advantage in this respect will go away because of it! All the feats of my young life are (or will be) on paper, and they’re not going anywhere. Perhaps, the older I grow, and the more I accomplish, the more I will inspire others. That’s the hope, writers!

5. Because I can use it to learn about topics that interest me.

About two years ago, I got very “into” the World War II era (1939-1945). I wanted to learn more, but there was only so much interesting information I could retain from books and Wikipedia pages. I took it a step further, and used my few findings as a base for a novel called “What I Wish I Said But Never Did.” That novel later became  The Girl Who Frosts the Cakes !

Not only do I love that project dearly, but I learned  so much  about that time and culture in the process . Now I can spit out all sorts of miscellaneous facts about the era, like the price of a loaf of bread, or when and why women’s trousers became “the thing” in America, or the value of a dollar in 1940 vs. 1945.

It’s wild to think that this novel, which I’ve been rewriting and cutting and shaping with care for what feels like forever, just started with plain curiosity. I can’t wait to find my next big interest!

6. Because I can use it to express my loves, opinions, and beliefs.

I love many things. Vanilla cake, coffee, weddings, skirts, curly hair, close-knit friendships, bookshops, the smell of old paper, small businesses, and red lipstick are just a few of my earthly loves, and every one of those things is deliberately featured in my novel.

What about my opinions and beliefs? I’m careful to weave those in my writing, too! As a Christian, I firmly believe Jesus is King, and I strive to live in a way that pleases Him. I very badly want this to be clear in all my writing; even in fiction.

And finally:

7. I’m simply in love with words.

I open up a book, and I feel at home. I love to wander through secondhand bookstores, running my fingers over the cracked spines and worn covers. Whenever I hear or read words I like, I’ll write them down as a reminder to use them more. As a kid, I would  beg  for a spelling test. I even love how inconsistent our grammar rules are, how nothing makes sense. English is beautiful nonsense.

In the English language, we only have twenty-six letters; but those twenty-six letters make up over  171,476 words.  How amazing is that? Think about it: 171,476 +  unique words! And now imagine how many words are in other  languages, including words and phrases we can’t even comprehend in English. Language is a mind-boggling miracle, and I’m in love with all of it!

2 SIMPLE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD LOVE YOUR WRITING, TOO

1. you’re more likely to stick to your project..

You wouldn’t put all that work into a project if you didn’t like it. Unless you write purely for money. In which case, I seriously doubt you would make it through the whole article to this point.

Case in point: if you love to write, you’re more likely to stick with – and finish! – your novel/screenplay/etc. How exciting is that?

And lastly, our final point of the evening:

2. It shows in your writing.

Believe it or not, you can tell when a writer doesn’t like his or her writing. It’s hard to describe, really. The best way I can think to explain is, it’s clear when someone has put love, care, and dedication into their work; in the reverse, it’s also apparent when someone  doesn’t.

Loving your writing is so, so important. If you don’t love to write – why do you do it?

I suggest keeping your very own “why I love to write” list. Tape it to your bathroom mirror, or on the shelf with your favorite cereal bowl, and update it often, because we’re always changing (which is a good thing!). This will keep you from getting discouraged, and thereby, you’ll be more productive in your writing!

I hope you enjoyed this special post! Don’t forget to check out 5 Little Ways to Love Your Writing as a sequel, and laugh along with us in this blooper reel! Happy writing!

5 Little Ways to Love Your Writing (And Why it’s Important)

2 responses to “7 Reasons I LOVE to Write (and 2 Reasons You Should, Too)”

You have certainly inspired me! I often have trouble believing my writing is actually worth reading. I’m in the process of climbing out of that pit called “writer’s block,” and this post has given me some of the strength to do just that. Thanks!

I’m so glad to have helped, Paige! I struggle with the very same problems. I just like to remember: there is always at least one person who wants to read our writing. Happy writing!

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News, Notes, Talk

Here’s 33 writers on why they write.

It’s 2021, but (surprise!) essentially nothing has changed: COVID is still ravaging the United States and no meaningful government aid has arrived. Oh, one thing has changed: a new, more contagious variant of COVID has spread to the U.S . Happy New Year!

During times of crisis, carving out time to write can feel silly, pointless: why do your morning pages when you could be, say, inventing a vaccine? To offer some encouragement, I took a look around the Internet and compiled 33 of our favorite writers’ own words on why they write. You might see some thoughts that can guide you, or you can just take heart in the fact that everybody grapples with this question. Check out their insight below.

Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies :

I started to sense that I was avoiding something about where I came from and who I was . . . And I realized that the best way to respond to this growing awareness was just to be still about it and to see what happened. And at some point, I started to turn and look over my shoulder—metaphorically speaking—to see what I had been running from. And at that point, there was this burst of creativity.. . .

I am trying to write to the universal. That is what I am trying to do. Period. End-of-story. What I hope is that by writing from a particular place—that I know and that I find fascinating and that I have a whole lot of love for and problems with—I can open onto the universal. ( Center Theatre Group )

Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind:

I think [ Leave The World Behind ]’s optimism lies really in that one idea, in communion. The simple, human reality of occupying space together. I’m glad that feels resonant right now. I hope that the novel can be good company in that way. This is a moment that is so baffling and extreme that any insight into the way we are supposed to behave or what we are supposed to do feels really lovely and helpful . . . That moment of interaction with a work of art offers something that even the most comprehensive understanding of the headlines will never be able to provide. It gives us something to hold on to. ( Paris Review )

Hilton Als, author of White Girls :

What I am trying to do for myself, always, is honor the delicacy of complication—the idea that people are not really one thing or the other, that there is this amalgamation of all sorts of nerve endings and truths . . . Wasn’t it Blanche DuBois who said “I know I don’t tell the truth, but what ought to be truth.” That’s kind of a great thing for people to know about themselves, that the truth is not an empirical thing; just as the “I” is not an empirical thing. I think that’s what I love investigating the most—how we put ourselves together. ( The Creative Independent )

Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half :

  Novels simulate the experience of thinking another person’s thoughts. I love television — I watch probably way too much — but when you’re watching TV, you’re not thinking the same thoughts. There’s no other way to do that than reading fiction. As close are you are to people you love, you will never think their thoughts or feel their feelings. That’s something the novel does that other forms cannot. I also appreciate the language of novels, and the fact that novels are a slower way to experience time. In the politically fraught moment we’re experiencing, it’s been refreshing to turn off a screen or step away from a constant influx of insane news.

I don’t want to ignore the moment we’re in, or abdicate responsibility to respond to it, but I don’t even know what a fictional response to Trump would even look like! Writing about black people who have humanity is already pushing back against Trumpism. Just asserting that black humanity matters, black bodies matter, black love matters, and black joy matters. That’s my general project. ( The Millions )

Patty Yumi Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace :

I have to feel a desire to write. I don’t know if there’s ever an end goal in mind. But I just have to feel like I really want to do it. I have to feel borderline desperate. And then I want to write. That’s what motivates me. Going long periods without writing, where I’m just doing other things, helps create that feeling of wanting to write . . . I’ve said before that writing for me isn’t therapeutic. I didn’t feel a sense of catharsis or anything like that. But I think I was very bothered by something. You know, this question, it was something I’d been thinking about for years. So it was something that was percolating in my mind. And I guess that’s what drove me to do this.

I think writing is an act of generosity and also selfishness at the same time. That’s my understanding of it. It’s selfish in a way of extracting material from your life and using that. For me, sometimes I think of it as a rather self-absorbed and selfish act, but the hope is that it could be seen as an act of generosity in the sense that maybe people will read the book and be moved by it or come to some kind of new understanding of something that they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t read the book. I think it’s both of those things at the same time. Ambiguity is pretty important to me. I think that’s what I’m attracted to in writing. A clear ambiguity. ( The Creative Independent )

Don DeLillo, author of The Silence :

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. ( Harper’s )

I write to find out how much I know. The act of writing for me is a concentrated form of thought. If I don’t enter that particular level of concentration, the chances are that certain ideas never reach any level of fruition. ( The Independent )

Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem :

Why do you think people need stories? We are stories. Even our names are stories. ( PEN America )

Writing is an extension of my body. I am seeking the body on the page, even the broken body, even the ecstatic body—even the broken and ecstatic body. I am looking for a field for the body to run in. I am looking for a field where the body might be struck down. I am looking for a field where the body might rest or hide or flee or reap or build a house or set a fire. The body doesn’t want solace—the body wants to be possible. The page has never solved my troubles, but the page has let me know them better, let me know the body of myself better through those troubles. Maybe. ( Kenyon Review )

Joan Didion, author of Let Me Tell You What I Mean :

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? ( HuffPost )

Akwaeke Emezi, author of The Death of Vivek Oji :

I also wrote [ Freshwater ] for other people who are where I was. I know that feeling of being trapped in the reality that you’re not allowed to think is real, that everyone else tells you is crazy. What ends up happening is that you just have a bunch of really isolated, really depressed, really suicidal people. It’s not fun. So, if I can help people shift realities a little bit into one that gets them a better way of being, a better quality of life, and helps them feel less choked, then hopefully, it’s gonna give to someone else what it also gave to me. ( NYLON )

Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections :

I’m always as a writer interested in the relationship between the personal, the structural, and the really intimate relationship between the personal and the structural. Sometimes that sounds like an abstract or political question, but for me, it’s a question about how we behave and how we make decisions . . .

So, when I’m writing characters, especially when I’m writing women and Black women, I’m aware of people who are aware of power as a thing that has to be negotiated with. I’m aware of people for whom that negotiation informs the most intimate decisions and their most intimate knowledge of self. I’m thinking always about the relationship between that awareness of the world and the way the world works, and the general space of inferiority, the general space of the difference between what we can say or how we feel and what we do. ( Lit Hub )

Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness :

To write a story or a poem or an essay is to make a claim about what we find beautiful, about what moves us, to reveal a vision of the world, which is always terrifying; to write seriously is to find ourselves always pressed against not just our technical but our moral limits. “One beats and beats for that which one believes,” says Stevens. And we do this without any way of confirming the value of what we’ve done, since unlike tobacco farms and coal mines novels and poems have no objective measure of accomplishment; neither the opinion of critics—which is so often wrong—nor our own sense of what we’ve written, which swings wildly by the hour, can offer any sure judgment of what we’ve made. ( Lit Hub )

I wanted to push what I could do in writing about sex . . . Sex seems like such an emotional and moral tangle. I wanted to view it from as many different angles as I could in this book. The different kinds of communication that sex can be, like communicating with a stranger or communicating with a beloved; I wanted there to be a kaleidoscopic surveying of sex as human activity and communication in the book. ( The Millions )

Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood :

If [a question is] important for me to figure it out, I figure it’s important for other people as well. I’m just like everybody. You just also never know where a subject’s going to take you, so I don’t think the magnitude is in the subject. I think the magnitude is in the approach, and how much you care about it . . . I hope that the book lets the reader experience my thoughts and then their own thoughts, and that my thoughts become their thoughts, and then their thoughts become more clear to them. To me, that’s a kind of help. ( The Creative Independent )

Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else : 

I’m trying to say what I mean, without any stylistic interruptions . . .

I’m trying to write something so good, so pure, so perfect that I’ll never have to have children; I’ll have created something that can stand in for me, that can live on after me.

I’m trying to whisper something that can’t be spoken aloud: I still think about you . . .

I’m trying to solve the math of my life, so complex it begins to surpass my abilities—X equals me plus my capacity to imagine minus the way I make people fall in love divided by my true nature, my wildness like the lion that bit the actor’s hand. That’s the kind of viciousness that keeps me alive. How’s that for a remainder? I am survival of the fittest, I am what endures when the Earth ends, I am exoskeleton instinct, alive with my own evolution.

I’m trying to outline all my contradictions . . . ( Lit Hub )

Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Never Let Me Go :

I’m not looking for any kind of clear moral, and I never do in my novels. I like to highlight some aspect of being human. I’m not really trying to say, so don’t do this, or do that. I’m saying, this is how it feels to me. ( HuffPost )

Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man :

Often I’ll have a feeling which is sometimes a sad or desperate or some kind of unresolved feeling, and I’ll marry it to some detail from the world, and those two things combined kind of set me on a course for writing a story. I don’t know what it’s going to be about. For example, I wrote down a few things the woman behind me on the plane said. She was talking about someone who was housesitting for her and the bird had escaped and she was describing how to catch the bird and what to do with it, and just little things she said, like, “Were you watching the house when Gabriel, the dove, escaped?” and it was like these little things which, in and of themselves, it’s like I’m not just interested in people’s dialogue, but that kind of loaned to some really personal thing in myself. That’s kind of where energy comes from for me… Yeah. ( Bookslut )

Raven Leilani, author of Luster :

E.L. Doctorow talked about the way he writes, and it’s like you have a car on the road, and the headlights illuminate three feet of what’s ahead of the car. He writes what’s in those headlights, and he keeps going as he drives. And that is 100 percent how I write. I admire writers who start a project and are like, I’m trying to do this, and I know how this is working—but for me, it’s kind of like an exorcism, in some ways . . . one reason I love writing and painting when I can is that I literally feel like I can disappear for a moment.” ( Elle )

“I wrote [ Luster ] for Black women. I wanted to write a character where room is made for the unruly. I wanted to write against respectability. Every Black woman I’ve spoken to about this book, the thing we end up talking about is, “I fucked up a lot. I was thrown a lot of detours.” I think it’s important to allow Black women leeway to stumble. ( The Rumpus )

James McBride, author of Deacon King Kong :

You write a memoir for the same reason you write a song — to help someone feel better. You don’t write it to show how smart you are or how dumb they are. You’re trying to share from a sense of humbleness. It’s almost like you’re asking forgiveness of the reader for being so kind as to allow you to indulge yourself at their expense. ( Electric Literature )  

Toni Morrison, author of Beloved :

Writing for me is thinking, and it’s also a way to position myself in the world, particularly when I don’t like what’s going on . . . I knew I always was compelled to do it, but I didn’t know how essential it was to me. I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it. I thought that kind of book, with that subject—those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little black girls—had never existed seriously in literature. No one had ever written about them except as props. Since I couldn’t find a book that did that, I thought, “Well, I’ll write it and then I’ll read it.” It was really the reading impulse that got me into the writing thing. ( National Endowment for the Arts )

Ottessa Moshfegh, author of Death in Her Hands :

I think every novel is a rite of passage . . . there seems to be a karmic force in my imagination where even if I threw something away, it would just come back. Like maybe I wanna try to throw this away and not write this, but it would just resurrect itself in a new form. I can’t really get away.

Writing projects feel a lot like if you had a guru and the guru was manipulating you so that you would have to live through certain experiences in order to learn a lesson, but the guru could have also just told you outright, “Here’s the thing you need to learn.” But you wouldn’t learn it unless you spent three years suffering, you know? In a way, I know that I’m the one writing it, but I don’t know if really I’m the one. I believe that there’s a higher power in charge of the imagination.

. . . I feel inspired by the idea that a novel could wake someone up and resonate in a way where they would put the novel down and be like, “Well, shit. How do I go back to lying to myself about X? Because I’ve just seen myself really differently.” That’s what I love about art. ( The Creative Independent )

Haruki Murakami, author of 1Q84 :

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories—stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness. ( Jerusalem Prize )

George Orwell, author of 1984 :

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us . . . [But] all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. ( Orwell Foundation )  

James Salter, author of Light Years :

Gertrude Stein, when asked why she wrote, replied, “For praise.” Lorca said he wrote to be loved. Faulkner said a writer wrote for glory. I may at times have written for those reasons, it’s hard to know. Overall I write because I see the world in a certain way that no dialogue or series of them can begin to describe, that no book can fully render, though the greatest books thrill in their attempt.

A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve. The rest takes care of itself, and so much praise is given to insignificant things that there is hardly any sense in striving for it.

In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe. ( Lit Hub )

George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo :

We all get into [art] for that very grandiose reason of wanting to break somebody’s heart or do some really beautiful thing. Those actually require some radical decision-making at certain points in the process. ( Writer’s Digest )

The result of [the] laborious and slightly obsessive process [of writing] is a story that is better than I am in “real life” – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining. And what a pleasure that is; to be, on the page, less of a dope than usual. ( The Guardian )

Danez Smith, author of Homie :

I write when I feel called to language. When I haven’t felt called for a while, I show up anyway to see what happens. I used to write every day. Not anymore. I try to touch words, mine or others, every day. That’s often books and poems and interviews. Sometimes it’s writing, sometimes reading, sometimes editing, sometimes listening. As long as I am actively living in or alongside language, I think I am in process. Sometimes the task at hand is to live, to witness . . . [People need stories] because we need to prove that we exist. ( PEN America )

Susan Sontag, author of Against Interpretation :

Obviously, I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent. . . This doesn’t entail moralizing in any direct or crude sense. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgement. ( At The Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning )

  [Writing] is lunacy. . . You have to be obsessed. People write me all the time, or get in touch with me about “what should I do if I want to be a writer?” I say well, do you really want to be a writer? It’s not like something you’d want to be—it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be. But you have to be obsessed. ( 92 Street Y )

Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain :

Because of my upbringing I felt so much like an impostor that I wrote in secret, and told no one (other than my husband)…Men from the west coast of Scotland are not known for revealing their tenderer feelings. Fiction allows me to make sense of things I am unable to express in other ways. It took 10 years to write the novel because I felt such comfort in the world I was creating. ( The Guardian )

Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life :

You wrote a novel so that people would believe that you knew your own mind . . .

These words you wrote in order to change the character of your life, these words you wrote in order to tear a little hole in your universe so that you might escape through it, these words which you wrote in order to tell a story like the one you’ve always wanted to read. It is not the you that is now. It is a different version of yourself, and so it is a kindness to yourself. ( Lit Hub )

Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl :

I write primarily to think through my obsessions. ( Lit Hub )

Bryan Washington, author of Memorial :

Having the chance to try and build another world and to occupy it, even if only for a little while, that’s a gift. It’s a challenge to become a photographer of whatever world it is that you’re attempting to recreate, irrespective of whether it’s one that you’ve lived in or maybe one that you’re not so intimate with. But it’s fun. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it. ( The Guardian )

Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys :

I grew up wanting to be the black Stephen King. I think the darkness of the world is terrifying. Some of my books try to find the humor or optimistic avenues we can take to deliver ourselves from the darkness. I also explore things that terrify us—you know, true monsters. For me, a zombie is a person who’s stopped pretending. They look like your loved ones, but they’ve dropped the veil of humanity to reveal themselves to be the monster that they’ve always been. If you look at the kind of brutalities I’m writing about in The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, human beings are pretty terrible. What do you do with that fact? How do you find hope for the future, when so many of us are compelled and driven by our worst natures? Not to be too bleak . . .

I write books because of where I am emotionally, I write books because I have an intellectual question I’m trying to figure out, and it is rare for me to do two books in a row that are directly about racism and our institutional failures. But before that I wrote a book about poker, and now I’m writing a crime novel. So I’m not sure if there’s a trend. I have no idea what the political purpose will be inside of me; I’m trying to fulfill my own artistic needs, and hopefully they will make enough sense to other people that they’re worthy of reading. ( The Nation )

An Yu, author of Braised Pork :

I write because spoken language often fails me. When feelings are said out loud they become less accurate, somehow. I can only hope that some readers feel the same way too. ( Lit Hub )

Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown :

I see someone else, standing on her island. She’s waving at me. Or is she? I don’t know. I’m over here on my island, and she’s over there on hers . . . And now here I am, a little less alone, because I see her over there, and she sees me. I wrote myself out of the room and now I will write myself off of this lonely little island, write more clouds into the sky and pour words into the ocean, and maybe, if I’m lucky, write myself a bridge across that ocean, to that island over there, to meet another person, to tell her the idea I have been holding in my head. ( National Writing Project )

Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart :

Whether it’s poetry or short stories, [I’m writing] because I am really consumed with some question or series of questions grouped under the same obsession. I keep writing until I’m sick of exploring that question . . . I think that every writer should have a question they can ask that there is no end to the pursuit of. Every writer should have questions big enough and pressing enough and multi-faceted enough and unanswerable enough that they occupy their entire life, however long or short it is. ( The Creative Independent )

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ANDRE BEGIN

50 Reasons Why I Love Writing

1. It allows me to express myself in ways that I can’t in my day-to-day life. 2. It allows me to use my imagination and to be as whimsical, as dramatic, as light or as dark as I want, when the world would typically frown upon it in my day-to-day dealings. 3. I can make…

1. It allows me to express myself in ways that I can’t in my day-to-day life. 2. It allows me to use my imagination and to be as whimsical, as dramatic, as light or as dark as I want, when the world would typically frown upon it in my day-to-day dealings. 3. I can make characters say what I wouldn’t dare say in my own conversations. 4. I can infuse my characters with feelings that I wouldn’t necessarily reveal in my day-to-day life, a process which can be very cathartic. 5. It feeds my appetite for creation. 6. I like writing because in the journey of preparing a first draft, it is just me and my thoughts. The creative process of a first draft is not a collaborative effort, which allows the artist in me to bring my vision to fruition on my own. 7. In a manner of speaking, each writing project is “my baby”. It is a joy to see what happens to each one as time goes by. 8. It allows me to put my own particular fingerprint of style and perspective on something that may have been said 1000 times before, but in my voice, it can sound completely different. 9. It enables me to be open and receptive to sources of inspiration around me. 10. Because of writing, I find myself more open to serendipitous moments. 11. Writing has helped me to appreciate the work produced by other artists. 12. When seeing another writer’s masterpiece… and they made it look so easy… it inspires me to pursue writing with even more heart and passion. 13. It forces me to continuously get my thoughts on paper. 14. It helps me process what goes on in the world around me. 15. It helps me unload when I have a lot on my mind. 16. Once ideas are parked on paper, I can move on… and come back and look at them with a fresh pair of eyes later with greater objectivity if I wish to do so, rather than letting things rattle inside my head. 17. Because writing requires a few attempts to get the words right, it has had a spillover effect on my face to face dealings. I tend to pause more before replying, hoping that the right words will come to me, rather than reacting by saying something I might regret later. 18. It gives me the freedom and the licence to dream. 19. Writing is a portable activity that can be done pretty much anywhere, anytime. 20. Writing allows me more time to decompress and to relax (as I write this from my deck, in my lawn chair, on a beautiful summer day, with a gentle breeze blowing by). 21. The tools available for catching passing thoughts are limitless. 22. Writing positive thoughts in an expression of gratitude, is one way I have found that keeps me grounded and in a more positive light, even in times of adversity. 23. Because of my writing, I sometimes feel I can observe things a little more in depth or to be curious about things more so than if I wasn’t writing. 24. Because of my writing, I am inclined to research topics that I might not normally have had any business checking out. 25. I have known for some time that writing was my calling. It is only recently that I put together the puzzle pieces to understand that my sensitive nature is part of the “package deal”. 26. My continuous quest, looking for quiet time and quiet spaces, makes sense now. It is hard to reflect and listen to the inner voice when there is a lot of external noise. 27. Once I have gotten my thoughts down on paper, I feel I can breathe better. It feels like writing helps energy flow through me rather than stay blocked within me. 28. Writing is one of those things I can keep doing for a long time, which makes me giddy with excitement. 29. I also get giddy with excitement knowing that as a writer, I don’t have to be locked into one style or one format. 30. An exciting part of writing is watching my own creative process evolve, refine and become more efficient. 31. Even though I don’t think of myself as much of a critic, writing has helped me to recognize when a story has gaps in its plot or is inconsistent in its own history. 32. The blog has taught me that no one can really predict what will be a hit with readers. Just the same, I am undeterred in my passion for writing. 33. If I make a mistake, the backspace button is there and I can rewrite something until it is perfect. In other creative disciplines, there isn’t always the easy equivalent to a backspace button. 34. Writing allows me to be my own boss in my writing universe. 35. Even as my own boss, I find that I can motivate myself and push myself to dig deeper in a topic or in an emotion. 36. If people don’t enjoy my particular style of writing, I am absolutely fine with that. I can’t think of another area of my life where I’m THAT self-confident and resilient. 37. Writing allows me to constantly be curious about the world around me. 38. My writing schedule maintains consistency in my life. 39. Writing calms me… except when my inner writer’s voice won’t shut up. 40. As I cultivate my writing skills, I find my listening skills are sharpening as well. 41. Writing makes me happy. 42. Writing something that I think turned out beautifully, makes me euphoric. 43. I count myself as incredibly lucky in having the ability to write in more than one language (but it takes practice to maintain that ability). 44. To me writing = complete freedom. 45. Even if I am having an off day as a writer and producing crap, I still feel fulfilled, doing what I enjoy most. 46. I am thrilled with the fact that people still read, despite the advances in technology that have divided people’s attention to other media. 47. I am thrilled that writers are needed for those other media as well. 48. I get great satisfaction when I notice my writing reflexes getting sharper, the right words coming more easily, and I trust my gut more. 49. The thrill of knowing that people read my work never gets old. For that I am immensely grateful. 50. The greatest gratification for me is when someone appreciates something I wrote because it connected and resonated with them.

How lucky I am to be a writer!

Did you enjoy this post? If you did, your likes and shares are most appreciated. If you haven’t already, please check out the rest of my blog at andrebegin.blog . From there, you can click on the “Follow” button to receive future posts directly in your inbox. Sincere thanks for reading! Have a great day, André

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[…] the top of the list was time for writing, reading and running, the standards for each of my to-do lists, but the aim will be to fully enjoy […]

[…] Reasons Why I Love Baking; 50 Reasons Why I Love Writing; 50 Reasons Why I Enjoy Running; 50 Reasons to Love Travel; 50 Reasons to Love Music; 50 Reasons to […]

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