Link to original post: [drupal=1803]Why I Write[/drupal]
I've been reading a few books lately. I finished Stephen King's On Writing and Strunk and White's Elements of Style last week, and I started reading The Best American Short Stories 1999 over the weekend. Each of these books had a section dedicated to how the author (or in the Best American series, the guest editor) began their writing career and why they do it. After reading those sections (and also El Nino's excellent blog), I asked myself: why do I write?
It may sound odd that a writer (God I hate that term, it's so pretentious, as if turning the verb "write" into a noun confers some kind of special status) is unsure of the reason why the do it. I gave a half-answer in El Nino's blog:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jam Stunna
In the end though, you don't write because you want to. You write because you have to. Like you said, you look for your stories out there because they MUST be told. If you have the urge, you have to do it. It's only a matter of when.
But that's such a canned, ready-made answer, and does nothing to actually address the reason WHY people feel the need to put words on paper. It also furthers one of the worst stereotypes ever, that writers and artists in general are special people who have special ideas that must be shared, that theirs is a tortuous existence as a channeler of some mystical force that compels them to create. Of course, that's all nonsense, another terrible outgrowth of the modernist and post-modern movements. All of a sudden bohemians are cool; artists are at war with a public that "doesn't understand them"; people have this romanticized idea of writers as people who shoulder a huge responsibility due to their talents. It's all nonsense. A person who is unhappy is unhappy regardless of their art. If they were janitors, they'd still be miserable.
I'm getting away from the point though. Why do I write? Perhaps it might be helpful to start at the beginning, as they say. Forgive me if at times I seem to lose track of the audience. I may just be talking to myself anyway.
My father tells me that from the moment I learned to write, I've been writing stories. I've always had an active imagination, to the point where my brother tells me it was difficult to play with me because I was always off in my own world. None of that helps me though, because I don't remember it first-hand. These are just things that people tell me about myself.
The first thing I remember writing was a school assignment. It was for an English class, and it was a story about anthropomorphic alien cats who came to earth. I don't remember any of the particulars of the story, other than my gifted and talented teacher, Mr. Mochak, suggesting that I call the story "Close Encounters of the Furred Kind". Being in the 5th grade at the time, I didn't appreciate what a great title that was, but I used it anyway.
School assignments don't count though, you have to do those. While I might have enjoyed writing the story (once again, I don't remember), that was hardly the point. I had to get the story done, regardless of my feelings towards it. Now, the first thing I remember writing purely for fun came in the sixth grade. As some of you know, I'm a big Star Trek fan, and I was back then too. So I would sit at my school issued laptop (they were terrible) for hours and write Star Trek fanfiction. Back then, I didn't know what fanfiction was. I just knew I liked the USS Defiant, and Commander Data and Lieutenant Dax and all the others. So I took my favorite characters from TNG and DS9, put them on my crew and made myself the captain, and fought wars against my brothers, my friends, everyone. I really, really enjoyed those stories, and I wrote twenty or so of them. Unfortunately, at the end of every school year, the laptops were sent out to be upgraded, and their memories were wiped. I lost everything I wrote, but I learned an important lesson: keep a hard copy. To this day, I write all of my stories long hand first.
I continued writing Star Trek fanfiction, until the eighth grade, when I was introduced to a little show known as Dragonball Z. Now I'd seen anime before; I used to rush home after school in the fourth grade in order to watch Sailor Moon do battle against Queen Beral. However, back then I didn't know that anime was its own genre, they were all just cartoons. When I started watching DBZ, my mind was totally blown. It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Fighting, explosions, super strength, laser beams, overly dramatic monologues, it had it all. I kept writing Star Trek fanfiction, but I also added to my repertoire by writing DBZ fanfiction. Between the summer of my 9th and 10th grade years, I wrote a two hundred page fanfic that combined elements of both. Basically, I was a Saiyan that was also the captain of a starship. Man, it was great. It was so great, that when people saw me working on it in school, I told them exactly what I was writing, with no shame. Some of them wanted to read it, and I eagerly forked it over. That's when I learned lesson number 2: always have TWO hard copies. I let someone borrow that story, and never saw it again. I didn't even get to finish it.
I dabbled in fanfic for a while longer, and in my junior year I joined our high school's newly formed Writer's Club and began what I considered my first original piece of fiction, a story called "Problems". In it, a young man tries to navigate the minefield of raging hormones and peer pressure. A younger girl likes him (he's a junior, she's a freshman), and his best friend eggs him on to have sex with her, even though the main character thinks it's wrong to take advantage of such a naive girl. This thing was long, about 17 single-spaced typed pages (around 7,000 words). I kept working at it and working at it, trying to have it ready by the springtime in order for it to be included in the club's first publication. My motivations had changed. I didn't just want to write, I wanted to write something good.
I didn't know it at the time, but that story was when everything changed. From that point on, I couldn't just sit down and write terrible fanfiction for fun; I worried about plot, characterization, pacing...all the things that good writers worry about, I suppose. In a way, it sucked alot of the pure dumb fun out of writing. I'm not exactly sure if it was worth it, but that's something to come back to later.
So I wrote and wrote, and revised the story several times. There was some coarse language, and the adviser for the group, an English teacher named Mr. Smith, told me that the principal wouldn't let a story with curse words get published. I toned it back, changed things around, and even altered the ending slightly, all to get it published. And it still got rejected. Even though the main character doesn't have sex with the girl (he feels bad about it; in retrospect that has to be the stupidest thing I've ever written), it was still too suggestive. Instead, all I got published was a few crappy poems I wrote. My prose was bad at the time, but my poetry was atrocious. It still is. I've only written one good poem in my entire life. That's when I learned lesson # 3: f*** the censors (haha). You can't please them anyway, so you might as well do what you were going to do in the first place.
I wrote some more terrible poetry in my senior year (note: if you ever see someone writing and they use the phrase "Nubian Queen", KILL THAT PERSON), but I don't recall writing any more fiction. I was still tweaking Problems, hoping that I could get it published at some point. It wasn't until my freshman year at Virginia Commonwealth University that I remember writing my next piece of prose. It was a story called The Horn, where two friends find a magical horn in a cave. Like all magical instruments, it seems like a great thing until it turns out to totally not be a great thing. I wrote the whole story in one sitting, listening to a song from the Orchestral Game Concert series the whole time (the song featured French Horns carrying the melody, and that's where the idea for the story came from. I still write stories based on the songs I hear, it's a neat thing I think). I basically forced myself to write it, because I hadn't written anything in so long. That's all it took: I was back to writing. Around that time I also started writing ideas for videogames as well, mostly JRPGs (Note: if you ever see someone writing and they're writing what they think would make a good JRPG, KILL THAT PERSON).
I turned out a story here and there, whenever the "inspiration" hit me, which is why I never wrote anything. The flash of inspiration is another popular myth. It doesn't exist. You may get ideas in flashes, but it will take a great deal of work to figure it out, plan it and get it down on paper. Finally I realized that I had to do something different. A friend of mine suggested taking a creative writing class. I always avoided them; I didn't need someone teaching me how to write like everyone else in the class, thank you very much. But I knew that I couldn't self-motivate myself to write. I needed a deadline, and a writing class would provide that.
I signed up for the class, and for an entire semester I essentially had to write a new story every week. It was probably the best decision I made in terms of writing. The professor didn't really teach us how to write, he just made us turn in something every week. I did my largest volume of writing that semester, and got one of the best stories I've ever written out of it. It's a pretty good story how I got that story, so I'll digress for a moment.
My writing class met once a week, Friday morning from 8:30 AM to 11:00 AM, which gave us a whole week to complete the assignment. Like I said, our professor let us write pretty much anything, but it had to follow a general prompt that he gave us. For that week, the prompt was to have the story take place near a body of water. I built this elaborate story in my head about a girl who would someday be the first female chief of her tribe, and in order to show her courage she had to slay a monster in the nearby river. This story was to be a sequel to a story I'd written before, so I already had all the characters, locations and stuff, so I relaxed and procrastinated on the assignment. I waited until Thursday night to start it, and before I knew it, it was 2:00 AM and I didn't have a single word on the page. It's alot easier to build an elaborate story in your head than it is to put it down on paper.
I was running out of time, so I threw the idea out and started writing whatever came to mind. The story ended up being less than two pages long, and it was about a boy and a girl who were walking through the woods together. They came to a river and slipped down the bank, and when they land on top of each other they realize that they had deeper feelings than just friendship for each other. A fantastic story born out desperation, and it's still one of my favorites.
That class was what I needed to get serious about writing, and I started entering writing contests here. I did it more so to force myself to write, but I was quite surprised when I actually managed to win a couple of contests. Yet as good as I thought I was, I still wasn't half the writer I could have been for a simple reason: I never read. I mean, I read newspapers and magazines, but not books. It seems so self-evident now that in order to be a good writer, you MUST be a good reader. I suppose that speaks to the level of my arrogance that I thought I could master a subject that I didn't study. It would take me a few more years to get the picture that reading was as important to the writing process (if not more so) than the actual writing. Hopefully you'll learn it if I yell it at you: READ AS MUCH AS YOU WRITE!!!
My writing has definitely improved since my first contest here in 2006, and I thought it was high time that I left behind the world of anonymous internet contests and started trying to win the real deal. Last November, I started a project: I would write one short story a month, every month, for a year. I would then submit every story to at least one literary magazine to try and get them published. That lasted until about February. I wrote a story in November and sent it out, thinking it was the best story I'd ever written. I knew that no one gets published on their first try, but it didn't stop my first rejection notice from being one of the most crushing experiences of my life. By the time I received that rejection letter I'd already written a story for December and sent it out to the same magazine (another lesson: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Send out your stories to as many different publishers as possible), and a few months later they rejected the second story too. But man, I'm telling you, that second rejection letter was so much easier to take than the first one. You just have to build up an immunity to it. You're going to get rejected, there's no way around it. All you can do is control how you react to it.
I started going back to college in January, and while I finished that month's story (a month late, in February; the story turned out to be 18,000 words of unreadable nonsense so I never even bothered to type up a second draft), things got way too hectic between school, work, and my family for me to write. I had ideas here and there, but I didn't write any more stories.
Now that it's summer time and I have the free time, I'm back on the horse and trying to get things going again. I'm reading alot, and while I'm not writing as much as I'd like, I'm still trying to get a few things done. So that's the story, but does it answer the question, why?
For the answer to that, I guess I have to go back to Problems. Like I said, that's when everything changed. I wasn't just a kid copying other people's ideas. Now I was coming up with my own, and I wanted them to be good. Hell, I wanted them to be great. There's a certain amount of innocence that's lost when you start writing to impress, which is part of the problem. One shouldn't write to impress people. Instead, write because you have a story to tell. If the story is good, then you'll want it to be good on paper as well, and accolades, awards and maybe even money will follow afterwards.
I also said earlier that maybe losing that innocence wasn't actually worth it, but now that I sit here near the end of this humongous rant, I'm pretty sure that it is. Even if I'm not at the level to be published now, I'm still a far better writer than I was in high school, and that makes me feel good. As for "needing" to write, that's not such a cliche to me anymore either. It's true; when I don't write for a while, something just doesn't feel right inside of me. The story doesn't have to be great, it doesn't even have to be finished. But it does need to get out, because that's what I do. Not to over-poeticize it or anything, but asking me not to write is like asking a tiger not to hunt. Sure, you can do it, but it's just unnatural. And that's why a tiger in a zoo will never be as awe-inspiring as one in the wild, because it can't do what it does best when you deny it's nature. And that's me, I suppose. I'm the tiger in the cage, but because I put myself there. Wanting to write well is not some sort of artistic cop-out; you don't have to "feel it" every time you want to create. Sometimes you just have to sit there and stare at a blank piece of paper and force the words out. It's a strange, contradictory thing, but what in life isn't?
I DO write because I have to. It might not be the reason that El Nino writes, or why you write. But it is the reason for me. I really do want to get published someday, but I'm fairly certain I never will. I'm just not good enough. That doesn't bother me though, because writing is as much about me as it is about them. If I get the story out, that's the most important part of the process. It would be absurd to say that I don't want people to read what I write. If that was true, I'd write the stories and put them in a safe or something. I want to show the world what I can do. I want people to enjoy my reading about my characters as much as I enjoy writing about them, yet that's a (very close) secondary concern to writing in the first place. No, I don't do it only for me, but I do it primarily for me, yes. I love it. It's what I've done my entire life, and it's what I'll continue to do until I die. There's something magical about combining the real world with your imagination and seeing it take form as your pen moves across a sheet of paper. Oh it's frustrating when it doesn't come out the way you want, or when it doesn't come out at all. But so long as one person reads my writing and enjoys it, even if that person is only me, then yes, it is worth it.
I've been reading a few books lately. I finished Stephen King's On Writing and Strunk and White's Elements of Style last week, and I started reading The Best American Short Stories 1999 over the weekend. Each of these books had a section dedicated to how the author (or in the Best American series, the guest editor) began their writing career and why they do it. After reading those sections (and also El Nino's excellent blog), I asked myself: why do I write?
It may sound odd that a writer (God I hate that term, it's so pretentious, as if turning the verb "write" into a noun confers some kind of special status) is unsure of the reason why the do it. I gave a half-answer in El Nino's blog:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jam Stunna
In the end though, you don't write because you want to. You write because you have to. Like you said, you look for your stories out there because they MUST be told. If you have the urge, you have to do it. It's only a matter of when.
But that's such a canned, ready-made answer, and does nothing to actually address the reason WHY people feel the need to put words on paper. It also furthers one of the worst stereotypes ever, that writers and artists in general are special people who have special ideas that must be shared, that theirs is a tortuous existence as a channeler of some mystical force that compels them to create. Of course, that's all nonsense, another terrible outgrowth of the modernist and post-modern movements. All of a sudden bohemians are cool; artists are at war with a public that "doesn't understand them"; people have this romanticized idea of writers as people who shoulder a huge responsibility due to their talents. It's all nonsense. A person who is unhappy is unhappy regardless of their art. If they were janitors, they'd still be miserable.
I'm getting away from the point though. Why do I write? Perhaps it might be helpful to start at the beginning, as they say. Forgive me if at times I seem to lose track of the audience. I may just be talking to myself anyway.
My father tells me that from the moment I learned to write, I've been writing stories. I've always had an active imagination, to the point where my brother tells me it was difficult to play with me because I was always off in my own world. None of that helps me though, because I don't remember it first-hand. These are just things that people tell me about myself.
The first thing I remember writing was a school assignment. It was for an English class, and it was a story about anthropomorphic alien cats who came to earth. I don't remember any of the particulars of the story, other than my gifted and talented teacher, Mr. Mochak, suggesting that I call the story "Close Encounters of the Furred Kind". Being in the 5th grade at the time, I didn't appreciate what a great title that was, but I used it anyway.
School assignments don't count though, you have to do those. While I might have enjoyed writing the story (once again, I don't remember), that was hardly the point. I had to get the story done, regardless of my feelings towards it. Now, the first thing I remember writing purely for fun came in the sixth grade. As some of you know, I'm a big Star Trek fan, and I was back then too. So I would sit at my school issued laptop (they were terrible) for hours and write Star Trek fanfiction. Back then, I didn't know what fanfiction was. I just knew I liked the USS Defiant, and Commander Data and Lieutenant Dax and all the others. So I took my favorite characters from TNG and DS9, put them on my crew and made myself the captain, and fought wars against my brothers, my friends, everyone. I really, really enjoyed those stories, and I wrote twenty or so of them. Unfortunately, at the end of every school year, the laptops were sent out to be upgraded, and their memories were wiped. I lost everything I wrote, but I learned an important lesson: keep a hard copy. To this day, I write all of my stories long hand first.
I continued writing Star Trek fanfiction, until the eighth grade, when I was introduced to a little show known as Dragonball Z. Now I'd seen anime before; I used to rush home after school in the fourth grade in order to watch Sailor Moon do battle against Queen Beral. However, back then I didn't know that anime was its own genre, they were all just cartoons. When I started watching DBZ, my mind was totally blown. It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Fighting, explosions, super strength, laser beams, overly dramatic monologues, it had it all. I kept writing Star Trek fanfiction, but I also added to my repertoire by writing DBZ fanfiction. Between the summer of my 9th and 10th grade years, I wrote a two hundred page fanfic that combined elements of both. Basically, I was a Saiyan that was also the captain of a starship. Man, it was great. It was so great, that when people saw me working on it in school, I told them exactly what I was writing, with no shame. Some of them wanted to read it, and I eagerly forked it over. That's when I learned lesson number 2: always have TWO hard copies. I let someone borrow that story, and never saw it again. I didn't even get to finish it.
I dabbled in fanfic for a while longer, and in my junior year I joined our high school's newly formed Writer's Club and began what I considered my first original piece of fiction, a story called "Problems". In it, a young man tries to navigate the minefield of raging hormones and peer pressure. A younger girl likes him (he's a junior, she's a freshman), and his best friend eggs him on to have sex with her, even though the main character thinks it's wrong to take advantage of such a naive girl. This thing was long, about 17 single-spaced typed pages (around 7,000 words). I kept working at it and working at it, trying to have it ready by the springtime in order for it to be included in the club's first publication. My motivations had changed. I didn't just want to write, I wanted to write something good.
I didn't know it at the time, but that story was when everything changed. From that point on, I couldn't just sit down and write terrible fanfiction for fun; I worried about plot, characterization, pacing...all the things that good writers worry about, I suppose. In a way, it sucked alot of the pure dumb fun out of writing. I'm not exactly sure if it was worth it, but that's something to come back to later.
So I wrote and wrote, and revised the story several times. There was some coarse language, and the adviser for the group, an English teacher named Mr. Smith, told me that the principal wouldn't let a story with curse words get published. I toned it back, changed things around, and even altered the ending slightly, all to get it published. And it still got rejected. Even though the main character doesn't have sex with the girl (he feels bad about it; in retrospect that has to be the stupidest thing I've ever written), it was still too suggestive. Instead, all I got published was a few crappy poems I wrote. My prose was bad at the time, but my poetry was atrocious. It still is. I've only written one good poem in my entire life. That's when I learned lesson # 3: f*** the censors (haha). You can't please them anyway, so you might as well do what you were going to do in the first place.
I wrote some more terrible poetry in my senior year (note: if you ever see someone writing and they use the phrase "Nubian Queen", KILL THAT PERSON), but I don't recall writing any more fiction. I was still tweaking Problems, hoping that I could get it published at some point. It wasn't until my freshman year at Virginia Commonwealth University that I remember writing my next piece of prose. It was a story called The Horn, where two friends find a magical horn in a cave. Like all magical instruments, it seems like a great thing until it turns out to totally not be a great thing. I wrote the whole story in one sitting, listening to a song from the Orchestral Game Concert series the whole time (the song featured French Horns carrying the melody, and that's where the idea for the story came from. I still write stories based on the songs I hear, it's a neat thing I think). I basically forced myself to write it, because I hadn't written anything in so long. That's all it took: I was back to writing. Around that time I also started writing ideas for videogames as well, mostly JRPGs (Note: if you ever see someone writing and they're writing what they think would make a good JRPG, KILL THAT PERSON).
I turned out a story here and there, whenever the "inspiration" hit me, which is why I never wrote anything. The flash of inspiration is another popular myth. It doesn't exist. You may get ideas in flashes, but it will take a great deal of work to figure it out, plan it and get it down on paper. Finally I realized that I had to do something different. A friend of mine suggested taking a creative writing class. I always avoided them; I didn't need someone teaching me how to write like everyone else in the class, thank you very much. But I knew that I couldn't self-motivate myself to write. I needed a deadline, and a writing class would provide that.
I signed up for the class, and for an entire semester I essentially had to write a new story every week. It was probably the best decision I made in terms of writing. The professor didn't really teach us how to write, he just made us turn in something every week. I did my largest volume of writing that semester, and got one of the best stories I've ever written out of it. It's a pretty good story how I got that story, so I'll digress for a moment.
My writing class met once a week, Friday morning from 8:30 AM to 11:00 AM, which gave us a whole week to complete the assignment. Like I said, our professor let us write pretty much anything, but it had to follow a general prompt that he gave us. For that week, the prompt was to have the story take place near a body of water. I built this elaborate story in my head about a girl who would someday be the first female chief of her tribe, and in order to show her courage she had to slay a monster in the nearby river. This story was to be a sequel to a story I'd written before, so I already had all the characters, locations and stuff, so I relaxed and procrastinated on the assignment. I waited until Thursday night to start it, and before I knew it, it was 2:00 AM and I didn't have a single word on the page. It's alot easier to build an elaborate story in your head than it is to put it down on paper.
I was running out of time, so I threw the idea out and started writing whatever came to mind. The story ended up being less than two pages long, and it was about a boy and a girl who were walking through the woods together. They came to a river and slipped down the bank, and when they land on top of each other they realize that they had deeper feelings than just friendship for each other. A fantastic story born out desperation, and it's still one of my favorites.
That class was what I needed to get serious about writing, and I started entering writing contests here. I did it more so to force myself to write, but I was quite surprised when I actually managed to win a couple of contests. Yet as good as I thought I was, I still wasn't half the writer I could have been for a simple reason: I never read. I mean, I read newspapers and magazines, but not books. It seems so self-evident now that in order to be a good writer, you MUST be a good reader. I suppose that speaks to the level of my arrogance that I thought I could master a subject that I didn't study. It would take me a few more years to get the picture that reading was as important to the writing process (if not more so) than the actual writing. Hopefully you'll learn it if I yell it at you: READ AS MUCH AS YOU WRITE!!!
My writing has definitely improved since my first contest here in 2006, and I thought it was high time that I left behind the world of anonymous internet contests and started trying to win the real deal. Last November, I started a project: I would write one short story a month, every month, for a year. I would then submit every story to at least one literary magazine to try and get them published. That lasted until about February. I wrote a story in November and sent it out, thinking it was the best story I'd ever written. I knew that no one gets published on their first try, but it didn't stop my first rejection notice from being one of the most crushing experiences of my life. By the time I received that rejection letter I'd already written a story for December and sent it out to the same magazine (another lesson: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Send out your stories to as many different publishers as possible), and a few months later they rejected the second story too. But man, I'm telling you, that second rejection letter was so much easier to take than the first one. You just have to build up an immunity to it. You're going to get rejected, there's no way around it. All you can do is control how you react to it.
I started going back to college in January, and while I finished that month's story (a month late, in February; the story turned out to be 18,000 words of unreadable nonsense so I never even bothered to type up a second draft), things got way too hectic between school, work, and my family for me to write. I had ideas here and there, but I didn't write any more stories.
Now that it's summer time and I have the free time, I'm back on the horse and trying to get things going again. I'm reading alot, and while I'm not writing as much as I'd like, I'm still trying to get a few things done. So that's the story, but does it answer the question, why?
For the answer to that, I guess I have to go back to Problems. Like I said, that's when everything changed. I wasn't just a kid copying other people's ideas. Now I was coming up with my own, and I wanted them to be good. Hell, I wanted them to be great. There's a certain amount of innocence that's lost when you start writing to impress, which is part of the problem. One shouldn't write to impress people. Instead, write because you have a story to tell. If the story is good, then you'll want it to be good on paper as well, and accolades, awards and maybe even money will follow afterwards.
I also said earlier that maybe losing that innocence wasn't actually worth it, but now that I sit here near the end of this humongous rant, I'm pretty sure that it is. Even if I'm not at the level to be published now, I'm still a far better writer than I was in high school, and that makes me feel good. As for "needing" to write, that's not such a cliche to me anymore either. It's true; when I don't write for a while, something just doesn't feel right inside of me. The story doesn't have to be great, it doesn't even have to be finished. But it does need to get out, because that's what I do. Not to over-poeticize it or anything, but asking me not to write is like asking a tiger not to hunt. Sure, you can do it, but it's just unnatural. And that's why a tiger in a zoo will never be as awe-inspiring as one in the wild, because it can't do what it does best when you deny it's nature. And that's me, I suppose. I'm the tiger in the cage, but because I put myself there. Wanting to write well is not some sort of artistic cop-out; you don't have to "feel it" every time you want to create. Sometimes you just have to sit there and stare at a blank piece of paper and force the words out. It's a strange, contradictory thing, but what in life isn't?
I DO write because I have to. It might not be the reason that El Nino writes, or why you write. But it is the reason for me. I really do want to get published someday, but I'm fairly certain I never will. I'm just not good enough. That doesn't bother me though, because writing is as much about me as it is about them. If I get the story out, that's the most important part of the process. It would be absurd to say that I don't want people to read what I write. If that was true, I'd write the stories and put them in a safe or something. I want to show the world what I can do. I want people to enjoy my reading about my characters as much as I enjoy writing about them, yet that's a (very close) secondary concern to writing in the first place. No, I don't do it only for me, but I do it primarily for me, yes. I love it. It's what I've done my entire life, and it's what I'll continue to do until I die. There's something magical about combining the real world with your imagination and seeing it take form as your pen moves across a sheet of paper. Oh it's frustrating when it doesn't come out the way you want, or when it doesn't come out at all. But so long as one person reads my writing and enjoys it, even if that person is only me, then yes, it is worth it.
)
