This question was posed in our regional forum at NaNoWriMo and I thought that I’d make it my blog post for the day because I found myself thinking about it quite a lot.
Why do I write?
I think the first and primary answer to that would be because I need to. I can’t quite explain it, but I’ve always had this itch inside my soul, this need to put words on paper. If I don’t, then my head becomes filled with background noise, my emotions wild and my general anxiety about living unbearable.
I typed my first story out on my mum’s widows 3.1 computer (brand new at that stage because we had just upgraded from a dos). It was raw, it was silly, it had no plot and no punctuation but, it was mine and it felt as if for the first time in my life I found some semblance of control over my soul. I lost that writing due to a faulty floppy disk, but a seed had been planted. I think I was 8 or 9 at the time. My next bit of work was my first fan fiction, a silly story in which I threw myself as a character into a cartoon, (Gummi Bears, gotta love those days). Thinking back, I was such a Mary Sue character then. The work was still raw, unorganized, unstructured and uninteresting but I was starting to get better and more comfortable with the idea.
I played around with writing for the next few years, through primary school and my first two years in high school. My work was private, sacred. Nobody was allowed to look at it until one day, I finally relinquished a piece of paper to a friend of mine. She read it and gave me the first true feedback that I ever had. She liked it, and her words and encouragement opened doors to me. I pushed out scores of pieces then, though always allowing only her to read it until finally I discovered the site www.fanfiction.net. I don’t know what made me post my first story there, but I did and I have not looked back since. It gave me my second reason for writing.
Feedback. I write because I’m a review junkie, an addict if you will. I love hearing what people think of my work almost as much as I do writing about it. I still post only half of the stuff that I write, some pieces being too personal to put in the public eye and some plots too complicated to make sense of, but that which I put out there, I’m very proud of. I’ve had some stunning reviews, stories of people telling me how I have touched their lives and that is the biggest reward that I have ever had.
Naturally, I would love to publish… One day. But, it’s not the most important bit to me. If I can make money out of this, and find a way to make this a living it would be wonderful but it’s not what I want primarily. At the end of the day, I just want to have fun because lastly, I write because I can.
Writing is mine, it’s something I developed for myself without ever receiving guidance (except for my friend’s encouragement, which meant worlds to me) or help. I did it for myself, developed it for myself and succeeded in it for me. I’m not good in a lot of things, but I believe that this is one talent that I somehow managed to get and use.
I hope that answered my regions question, lol.
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