Why Write?

Understanding Your Deepest Motivations

Barbara O’Neal

I had a friend early in my career who published her first book at the same time I did. Her novel was well received, but she never wrote another. Years later, I asked her why. She said, “I went shopping for author dresses instead of writing another book.”

She wanted the life of an author, not the life of a writer. She wanted the attention gained from book events and reviews, not the solitary and sometimes lonely existence of a working scribe. In the end, the reality wasn’t compelling enough to hold her interest, and she headed in another direction.

Another writer began her career writing romances. She did very well, but after seven or eight books, she changed direction and started writing literary historical novels. She thought she didn’t care what she wrote as long as she earned money, but it turned out that she wanted the respect of the literary community as badly as she wanted the financial benefits.

What motivates you to write? Is it money? Fame? Do you want to change the world, make someone laugh, entertain the masses, see your name in lights, or make your mark in the literary world? Do you want to live a different life than that of your siblings? Do you want to model your experiences after those of your literary heroes?

Maybe it’s all of the above. My own motives are a big mix. But I think it’s important—crucial, even—to understand your core motivation as a writer, the one hidden beneath the surface motivations of making a living, earning respect, or leaving a legacy.

CONSIDER WHY YOU DO THIS

Why do you write? Maybe a more accurate question is: Who are you writing for? Who is your reader, that one person you imagine as you write? The answer is different for all of us, and it can change over time. Perhaps you begin writing for your brother, then for your writing teacher, and then for a critique partner.

Here’s what I think: More than writing for any one person, you are writing to share a story.

Humans are universally driven to tell tales. The members of ancient civilizations painted symbols on the walls of their caves to record their hunts. Can you picture that prehistoric man haunted by his epic battle with a bison or a woolly mammoth? He might have tossed and turned on his furs as the firelight flickered, remembering and reviewing the danger and the triumph of his day—until he was driven to share it, to mark the event. “I lived,” he declared to the world with his story painting, “and this is what I saw.”

All these centuries later, his story remains. We are still moved by it, still awed.

In the dark ages of Ireland, the people were clannish and suspicious. Only bards were given free reign to travel. They carried stories from hearth to hearth, bringing news and entertainment. Their status was almost as high as that of kings and queens.

The monks of medieval Europe spent their time transcribing the Bible into illuminated manuscripts of exquisite beauty, preserving the holy stories for all time.

When you embrace the need to share a story, surface-level motivations like fame and fortune begin to melt away.

EMBRACE STORIES

When I was nineteen or twenty, my friend had a baby. It was the first time I’d witnessed the process of pregnancy and birth, and when the boy was born, I wrote a letter to him, celebrating his arrival in the world. I was so filled with emotion that I could not talk about it; I could only write. I wanted to mark this simultaneously fresh and ancient, unique and common event. I didn’t want it to be forgotten.

We see the same drive to record even the most mundane events in the overwhelming number of selfies that surround us and in the Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook accounts that chronicle a single everyday life—multiplied billions of times. We chronicle both major and minor events: births and deaths and big hunts, our freshly pedicured toenails, the pile of dishes in the sink. The record has become like the debris left behind after a great storm—it carries no narrative.

In a world so inundated with data, records, and the minutiae of daily life, writers play an enormously important role. No matter our field, we are charged with the duty of forming a narrative out of that hectic data. We are asked to take a multitude of details and tie them together to form a story that makes sense; a story imbedded with a lesson, perhaps; a story that might uplift, give peace, or prod the reader to think or laugh.

We come to the page for many reasons—for the hope of glory, for the promise of fame, to take revenge, to prove we are more than our families, school bullies, or ex-wives think we are. We want money and validation, honor, recognition … all those things.

So we say.

In truth, it’s all about the story. You might be writing an exposé, the story of business or government wrongdoing. Or maybe you’re developing a nonfiction tale of how rich guys got rich (and there’s more to the story than meets the eye) or capturing a single moment’s observation in the music of a poem. Or you might be crafting a rage-filled tome meant to declare war on an unjust society, or a gentle romance to give relief to a weary woman.

Regardless of what you write, and regardless of your surface reasons, your motivation is rooted in the drive to say, as that caveman did, “I lived. This is what I witnessed.”

Story is why writers exist, and story is why you are driven to the page. In a world so overwhelmed with everyday trivialities, we need writers more than ever to sift substance from the noise, to make sense of a chaotic world.