Why?

Any man who keeps writing is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. — Ray Bradbury

It's almost 5 o'clock in the morning when I write this. Given the amount of traffic this place has been getting lately, even the spam-bots are tired of sticking around. Will anybody read this? Eventually, some day — I can only hope so, at any rate.

I'm writing this because I need to write it. I'm losing sleep because I'm caught up in the fervor of creation, of sitting and applying myself while I watch my imagination come alive. I'm just one voice in a choir of millions — tens or even hundreds of millions, maybe — who has a story to tell and who doesn't know how to get the voices to go away.

Plenty of people make a good, successful living for themselves in any myriad number of ways that have nothing to do with creating or imagining a thing. They're drivers, accountants, stockbrokers or entrepreneurs — they make their money through hard work, sacrifice, and at the end of the day they go to bed without having to hear voices in their head or imagine the same bit of dialogue or a scene that's played in their heads a hundred times that day.

Do writers find themselves so lucky? Let alone the fact making a career out of using their imagination, they put all of the time and effort at the beginning, pouring their heart and soul up on a word processor or across a written page, focusing all of their time and attention on a story that 99% of people might never even see. It's a depressing, thankless end for all of their hard work.

So why do they do it? Why do we open a vein and bleed all over a page just for a chance to tell a story — OUR story, the one that only WE can tell? Why go through all of that effort, most of it painful, impoverishing, and completely thankless, just for a chance to entertain or enlighten an audience that might never thank us or take the 60 seconds it might cost them just to tell us if they enjoyed it or not?

… why do we do it?

Why?