Why Do We Write?

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses." - George Bernard Shaw


This was recently re-posted on Rick Riordan's blog. I enjoyed it a lot.
http://rickriordan.blogspot.com/2011/01/top-five-misconceptions-about-writing.html

Personally, I write because I love it. Sometimes I do it because I'd go crazy otherwise, and sometimes I do it for the sheer joy and satisfaction.
Yes, I want to be published and have the satisfaction of seeing my name on the shelf when I walk over to Barnes and Noble after school, and yes, I want to make money off of my writing...but those are all just bonuses. Those are reasons why I want to be published. It's not why I write.


Besides, if I didn't write, I never would have met all of you lovely people from writing group and/or in the comments.


While rehearsing my piece for the Debate/Speech tournament (it's "In The Maelstrom," which you can find in my self-published anthology Thoughts on Life) on the 12th and 13th, the teacher acting as our coach asked me if I had written it out of some sort of depression or angst.
He also kept asking about the message I'd been going for when I wrote it.


I was incredibly unhelpful and told him that I honestly hadn't been going for anything, nor did it spawn from any particular emotion. I just felt like picking up a pencil and scribbling some stuff down, and that poem is what happened.


I was, however, perpetually living at some level of misery during those years known as Middle School, which is when I wrote it. Does that count?


It's become decidedly more awesome now that I've been working on it in a performance capacity. I hope to get a video of it at some point, instead of just me talking to the camera after each round like I did last time we had a tournament.