Why I write

With all the chaos of writing, revising, publishing, traveling, etcetc that goes with being a writer, I sometimes lose sight of the moments that really matter. It’s easy to get lost in the trees, especially when all the trees are made up of words. You start to bury your head in all the adjectives and grammar and research and questions and pretty soon you’re drowning and you can’t see the surface.

But every now and then, I’ll get letters from readers that pull me out of the woods. They remind me what the forest looks like.

A year ago, a teen fan emailed me with a heartfelt message of despair; I wrote back, encouraging him to keep his chin up. Fast forward to this past holiday season, when I received another email from him. Inspired by Day and June’s story, he decided to volunteer with two groups in Peru and spent the better part of a year both educating children in Trujillo and working at a clinic in a small, remote, and poor village. (With his permission to share,) he wrote: “My mind kept going back to how disparate parts of the world can be.  The paradise that people in the US believe to be dystopic, and the dystopia that people there believed to be their paradise…. I wanted to be like Day. I can’t really parkour, but, maybe if I tried, I might be able to change a couple of things that I thought weren’t right.  And, so I tried.  I’m not sure if I made a big difference, but I know that I tried my best to fight against some harsh realities of a pretty dystopian reality of poverty and disease.”

And a couple of days ago, I received a letter from a teacher that reduced me to happy tears. She told me about one of her students, a bullied 7th grader facing immense challenges both at home and in school, and how he cried when he succeeded in finishing Legend. Legend was the first book he had ever finished. (I cried too.)

Every step in the writing journey is magical in its own way. The moment you get your first offer from an agent. The moment you get the first offer from a publisher. The moment you hold your first hardcover in your hands. The signings you attend, the people you meet, the expos and articles and excitement and lists and deals!deals! and traveling and meeting other writers and so on and so forth.

But truly, the reason I write (and, I think, the reason most of us write) is to reach out to a reader, to tell a story that matters to me in the hopes that it will also matter to someone else. We write literary fiction, commercial fiction, thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, historical, etc. It doesn’t matter. You never know how your words will affect someone’s life.

So thank you, readers and fans, for all of your letters and words of kindness. I told you my story, and now you all tell me yours. Your stories are incredible. I’m so proud and honored to write for you.

And to booksellers, publishers, educators, and librarians out there—you guys do amazing work. You change the lives of our young people every day.

[The organizations that the first reader volunteered with are Mosoq Ayllu and Una Sonrisa de Amor. They do fabulous things.]