Why I Write

I’m often so blown away by my favorite writers that I question why anyone (myself included) does anything but abandon all and read everything they’ve ever written.

For a long time, I thought I shouldn’t write because I hadn’t read enough of those writers. I thought that somehow reading, but not actually writing, would be enough. I was wrong. I need to write. If something inside you just responded “yes!” to that statement, then you probably need to write, too.

I write to make sense of my life and others’ lives. To remember things and to work myself into forgetting things. To defend scars and to confess sins. To open old wounds and discover secrets I don’t even know I’m hiding.

I write with the hope that getting to be a better person means writing about myself at my best – but also at my worst.

Most of all, I write to connect with a part of the world that I can’t explain without a pen and a paper, a whirring laptop, a crayon and a paper napkin, or whatever else I can find to scrawl out the moments that matter.

Why do you write? I’d love to hear from you.