101 TIWIK #80: Why Do You Write?

Welcome back to 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book! Today is post #80, isn’t that exciting! Only 21 more posts to go.

As you probably know if you’ve been following my blog, I took a little break from 101 TIWIK to bring you Dreadless, a true story about how I learned to drive when I was over thirty. If you haven’t read it, check it out, it’s a fun story that also presents a method for overcoming deep emotional challenges.

I needed some time to organize how I was going to present the last 20ish posts of 101 TIWIK. I’ve finished talking about the craft involved in producing a book, and had intended to spend the next posts talking about how to then market your book. However, I wasn’t sure how to approach this subject. While I feel extremely comfortable instructing other writers on craft, I don’t feel qualified to instruct them on marketing.

After some thinking, I decided that I do have something to offer on this topic; if not specific expertise, then the ability to pull back and look more broadly at the question of what to do with your book after you’ve written it. So in the next twenty posts I’m going to talk about some different options and approaches, and how you might plan for them during the actual writing process (after all, these are things I wish I’d known before I wrote my first book). While I had intended for this section to be very nuts and boltsy, instead it’s going to be a bit more philosophical, but I think that will be more useful. The nuts and bolts of the post-publication process are everywhere on the web. What I will do is try to include some references to good sites with the posts where more detail might be useful.

In today’s post, I’m going to present a question whose answer might completely change the way you plan to write. Without further ado:

Why do you write?

I’ve read a lot of writing craft and marketing books that begin with this question. However, the possible answers they posit are often unsatisfactory. Usually it comes down to three options: one: that you are writing for money and recognition, and isn’t that stupid of you, you might as well put your resources into buying a lottery ticket; two: that you are writing to express the deep humanity of your soul and that’s all very well but you want to get paid for the damn stuff eventually, don’t you. I mean, you might as well just keep a journal if you aren’t getting paid. The third–and in most of these books, only acceptable–answer is some vague place between the first two, that you want recognition–but not too much recognition, because that would be fame and that isn’t for humble writers like us–and you want to get paid but not too much because if you want to do something for money, writing really isn’t it–and you want to express deep parts of yourself but only if those parts are what’s going to be popular when you finally publish your book.

I’m going to try to elegantly sidestep the resulting tangle of such advice by posing a different answer to this question: Perhaps there are actually many reasons why we write, all of them valid, and the reasons which you identify with the most strongly are the guides you can use to shape the path not only of your writing process, but how you intend for your writing to interact with the world outside of your head. If you do at all.

Here are a few different reasons why you might be writing. This list is in no way comprehensive; there are probably many more reasons. But it will give us a starting point. In no particular order:

• Money part 1: Riches–while as a rule writing is not the highest paid profession out there, some writers have done really well for themselves. It’s not inconceivable.

• Money part 2: Support of your craft–this is where you don’t care about being rich, you just want to make enough money from your writing to quit your day job.

• Fame–See Money Part 1. You know who J. R. R. Tolkien is, even if you’ve never read fantasy in your life.

• Recognition–a little different from fame, this less of wide public visibility and more being recognized by your peers for your achievements. This would be like winning a Hugo award.

• Connection–to other readers, other writers; you write to share the deep truths of humanity with other humans. You write to be less alone in the universe.

• Interaction–writing is an excuse to socialize; you love meeting other writers, attending functions, organizing writing groups and clubs.

• Inner Processing–Writing is how you organize the events and emotions of your life.

• Social Change–Maybe your writing has an agenda; for example, you want to use storytelling to show the horrors of dolphin fishing as a way to campaign against it.

• Self-expression–Writing is how you express your deep inner pain. Or maybe you have a burning story that just needs to come out.

• Self-Entertainment–you’re bored, and writing is funner than video games or Netflix.

• Flow-state achievement–writing is like a sport to you. When you write you lose all sense of time and place, and you come away feeling invigorated. You just want to keep experiencing this state over and over again.

• Challenge and mental growth–This is similar to fame and recognition but more personal. You want to be the best mystery writer out there, and you vigorously pursue your craft to achieve this. You hold yourself to a high standard, perhaps higher than you might need to in order to be successful in the eyes of the world.

I’m sure there are many more reasons to write than this. Fortunately, this is not a “circle the one that applies” situation. You might write for several or even all of these reasons. I write for most of them. But as you examine the list and add your own reasons to it, you might start to notice that certain ones pull you more than others. In order to get a sense of which reasons are more important than others, I recommend taking this list, or one of your own making, and putting it in order from most important to least important. In order to prioritize them, it helps to pretend they are exclusive. If you had to choose between self-expression and fame, which would you choose? There is no right or wrong answer here. Just be completely honest, because your prioritization should reveal why you write, and where to go from here.

As an example, here is my list in order of priority:

1. Flow-state achievement

2. Connection

3. Self-expression

4. Challenge and mental growth

5. Money part 2: Support of your craft

6. Inner Processing

7. Social Change

8. Recognition

9. Self-Entertainment

10. Interaction

11. Fame

In order to better analyze my list, I’m going to break the many different reasons into three basic categories: Art, Community, and Business. I’ll talk more in depth about those categories and their implications in the next post; for now, I just want you to see how it simplifies the reasons list and makes it somewhat quantifiable. Here is the list with those categories attached:

1. Flow-state achievement: Art

2. Connection: Community

3. Self-expression: Art

4. Challenge and mental growth: Art

5. Money part 2: Support of your craft: Business

6. Inner Processing: Art

7. Social Change: Community

8. Recognition: Community

9. Self-Entertainment: Art

10. Interaction: Community

11. Fame: Business

As you can see, two out of the top three reasons on my list entail art, and only two reasons on the entire list entail business. As I will discuss at more length in the next post, this doesn’t mean that I’m only going to produce writing as art and completely neglect the business side of writing. What it does is to reveal to me what is most important about writing, so that I can know if I’ve veered from the original drive that brought me into contact with it. Your list might look completely different, and that’s ok. Maybe writing is more of a social endeavor for you than an artistic pursuit. Or maybe you see writing more as a business venture. That’s ok too.

The last twenty posts of 101 TIWIK are going to go into the details of these three different paths through writing. In the next post, 101 TIWIK: Three Paths, I’ll explain a little more what each category entails, and how you might use the knowledge of your personal reasons for writing to actually achieve those goals.