This is why I write

Yesterday I posted a picture on Facebook of my adorable lil bug banging on my laptop with the hashtag of #nanowrimo. Curious if there were other people out there doing the same I clicked it. Sure enough, people hashtaged. Only one in particular caught my eye.

I don’t remember the guy’s name, and if I did I wouldn’t repost it here. Essentially he was talking about how he was too old for NaNoWriMo, too old to be living “a dream” and was there for done writing. He brought up some points I know every writer/author thinks about from time to time, but one that I know we all fear: What if no one reads my stuff?

That, I think was his selling point, that he would put in all this work into an idea he loves, creating a story he thinks is great, and then have maybe 30 people read it. Well, let me tell you, I would kill  for thirty people to read my work some days. Okay, not really, but you know what I mean. When I was doing chick-lit I would see people were buying but no one reviewed, no one “fanned” me, and as far as I knew I was a cheap read that someone bought and totally forgot about in the mass sea of ebooks that people throw out there. It was really no better when I switched to fantasy, going on Wattpad and finding no one reading my stuff. Yep, fun times.

So it gets me thinking, what’s the point? When even my Beta reader seems to have little interest in actually reading my work why am I still doing it?

Simple, I’m doing it for me.

There is a quote out there by Toni Morrison that goes

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

There are a lot of those. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot I want to read that are already written, but there are many that aren’t. Those are the day dreams that circle in your head, made of fantasy and fiction that you think about over and over again. Maybe it’ spawned from an ending you didn’t like, or a character that deserved more attention. Those seeds of inspiration grow wild in my head, which may be why I have switched genre’s back and forth over the last decade. But regardless of the why or the how sometimes I can’t get settled until I write those ideas down. I’ve been that way for as long as I could write story, and I will likely stay that way until I no longer can. Every writer, true writer, needs to tell stories even if no one reads them.  It’s the only way to stay somewhat sane.

So now I will return to my NaNo work. Maybe it will be read, maybe it won’t, but either way is okay with me.