Monday, November 7, 2011

What's Your Take: Why Do You Write?

This whole NaNo thing has kicked off a bit of an existential crisis for me: Why am I doing this? This novel is going to suck. It's derivative and poorly written. It will never see the light of day. It's the third idea I've started. Yesterday I started a fourth idea.

It's almost like my brain is creating new ways to get me to fall behind. Yet today, at 10 a.m. Central time, I will put in an hour of writing before going back to slogging around the Internet looking for new work. Then I'll put in another hour. I'm going to try to get in 3,000 words today, but ... who knows if I'll get that far.

The truth is, I don't have the foggiest clue why I write. I pretend it's so that I can have some element of control over my life, but let's face it: the work goes where it goes. That's both exhilarating and terrifying. Mostly it's been terrifying lately. Yet I'm still doing it. It's like I'm the very definition of crazy.

What's your take? Why do you write? 

5 comments:

Old Kitty said...

Oh but look at how you are inspired by new ideas just by this exercise!! I say if I don't write stories I'll shrivel up inside and just be a shrivelled up old prune. With my stories - I work very very very hard on them and every so often even if only one out of 100 make it - I'm suddenly no longer a prune but a nice juicy plumb! LOL!

Take care and keep going!!!! x

Old Kitty said...

p.s. I meant plum! LOL!!!

Take care
x

Stacy said...

hah! Thanks, Kitty! Weirdly, I broke through that day and wrote quite a bit that felt like it was much better. Let's hope I can keep it up!

fairyhedgehog said...

I write to see if I can! That's why I like competitions and challenges.

Stacy said...

That's a good reason, Fairy. Joanne Harris calls it "playing 'Can I?'" I think I may write for this reason, too.