Goodreads asked Michael Ransom:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Michael Ransom For me, there are two equally amazing benefits of being a writer that transcend time and space, and a third that is more immediate.

First, I thoroughly enjoy that sense of finally feeling a bonafide, mysterious kinship with all other writers, living and dead. In essence, I've finally joined a very specific subset of humanity whom I've respected for decades, ever since my teachers began cracking open the little walnut of my mind and exposing it to new ideas, new characters, and even new worlds...all created by those mysterious people otherwise known as "writers".

I'm equally buoyed by the idea that I will now transcend my own death in a tiny sense. That someone, somewhere, will one day crack open the spine of one of my books and read it after I'm long gone from the face of the earth, and find a new way to think, or experience a sort of kinship with one of my own characters, or simply be thrilled by a mystery. That is a powerful, exciting feeling and it's definitely another reason I love being a writer.

There is one more immediate benefit of being a (published) writer. I cannot begin to describe how many people whom I have never met nor will I ever meet, who have written reviews or in some cases even written to me, about how much they loved my book. That, too, is a powerful aphrodisiac for an author- to sense that you have now, finally, literally transformed into a very different kind of person than you were before. Previously, you could only impact people who came into contact with you or were within the range of your voice. And now? Now you can impact people thousands of miles away across the face of the globe... and if you're really tuned into it, you'll realize how important that is...you'll envision the tenuous, silvery web of your own creation surrounding the globe... and realize that for now and forever, each time you plink the string of your writing in one way or another, all those people will hear it.

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