Why Do You Write Books?

I've been asked why I write books for ages 1 - 100.
The kids' books are just fun.
The others take me into worlds that I find interesting, some of which I live in as I create them.
If you're interested, you can see my work at www.mrlumpybooks.com.
What I'd like to know is why you write?

Cacoethes scribendi and mischievousness.

But most of my published books were actually written out of an obligation to provide teaching to my religious supervisees.

I've heard a quote from I think it was CJ cherryh, that she can't not write them. The story its there fizzing in her blood and brain and needs to be put into words.

I wrote my poetry for therapeutic purposes, then published them for others to enjoy. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to entertain, so my sci-fi works are my attempt at that.

Because I've done it all my life. And at retirement age, it beats watching daytime telly.

>5 ForAttentionPress:, same for me, it was what I've always done. And then recently I started re-evaluating and thinking, maybe I should just drop this hobby now? Never published anything anywhere. More importantly, it's just not fun. Forcing myself to do something that isn't fun and results in nothing is actually no better than the telly idea.

Before I closed the door on it, I looked for something to get me in touch with what I loved about in in the first place. Write something fun, that makes me laugh, or gets me excited. Don't plan so much in advance, go back to a 'gardener' instead of 'architect' approach. And it worked. I'm enjoying writing again. Forget about trying to write something serious or impressive. Write something fun and exciting. If I'm lucky maybe I'll still find a serious and impressive streak in it somewhere in editing, but at the writing stage I'm refusing to think about it anymore.

So I guess my answer is, I write when it entertains me more than other options do. It's just another creative past-time like any other, and I'm better at it than I am at visual arts, sewing, music, etc. Feels more productive than my favourite cellphone games, the telly option, puzzles. I might write something that a great, great, great grandchild will discover one day, and make them feel like they got to know me a little. They won't even know about the other things.

> a 'gardener' instead of 'architect' approach

Nicely put, and good for those of us without professional ambitions in the field. I get a little money from my self-published writing, but I consider myself an amateur in the best sense of the word.

I was reminded of this topic while reading an older interview with Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, where she says "If you just pick something (to write about) because you want impress somebody, you're not going to revise it. You're not going to throw away an entire manuscript and try it again. so it's got to have the questions that you want answered, that you feel like if you don't do it, you're going to die. It should be that level, because the possibility and promise of success in fiction are so negligible." She closes the interview by saying,

"It's a very special thing to find a person who likes moving words around, finding the right verb. I think that's our gift. What makes writing painful for all of us is when we have expectations of recognition. Recognition is something that's really fanciful and evanescent, so I hope that I'll always - I mean, I wish it for you as a reader and a writer, but I wish it for myself too - continue to find joy in my words, in the sentences and in the feelings behind the sentences. Because that's what made me feel like I wanted to join this tribe."

I don't have a choice! The stories form in my mind then I create characters. For me, when I develop a character they become alive. The characters then take over and tell me what to write. I just have to keep up. The characters haunt me until I finish THEIR story. So, as I said, I have no choice.

Another encounter with the topic I just had, this time in Different Seasons by Stephen King:

The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that's why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings.

I'm with the people who say they don't have a choice. The stories keep filling up my head. They want out.

The whole getting just the right verb thingy does not strike any bells for me. I want to tell the story effectively, so obviously I need to pay attention to language. But I'm not telling a story just because I want an excuse to ponder word choices.

>10 Cecrow:
Someone should point out to Mr. King that it is possible to tell a story using present tense.

I do think that understanding that what happened in the past can inform the future is inherent in story creation.

But why assume it is about getting ready for future mortality?

Personally I think stories are all about life. Nobody I've met, even the two who had previously died, could really say much coherent about being dead.

Yet another writer for whom this thing is a compulsive behavior. Some years ago, just before the advent of ebooks and the opportunity to publish directly and independently, I quit writing fiction. Editors and potential agents alike thought well enough of the quality of what I submitted, but couldn't see a market for it. I decided I was wasting my time, that I'd given it an honest try and it was time to move on to to other things. Suffice to say that this proved to be a very unhealthy decision. Fortunately, the indie option developed before permanent harm was done.

>12 ThomasWatson: "Suffice to say that this proved to be a very unhealthy decision. "

Agreed. If I felt some moral obligation to only write what publishing houses considered marketable I would be suffering.

I did know at least one author who worked that way, though. She considered giving her publishers what they wanted the mark of a "professional author" which when I thought about it, did fit the dictionary definition of the phrase, but I had previously considered "professional" writing to be all about quality.

(Not that I'm always certain what counts as "quality" in regards to writing.) ::rueful::

I'm moving a conversation I'm having with mysterymax on the Introductions Thread here, because it seems to fit this thread better.

I'm not sure which part of your message the "How about you?" referred to, so...
"I think I'm more a visual person than a sound person"
I'm more of a sound person than a visual person, but possibly even more than sound I'm a kinesthetic/spacial person. So I do scenes in my head, like you do, but I'm feeling and hearing the scene more than I'm seeing it.
I often don't know what my characters look like, but I know what they did and what they said, and what it felt like for them to have had those experiences.

"this scene popped into my head like I was watching a movie. That had never happened to me before"
I've never had a movie in my head, but I've been making up stories since I was a kid. That's how my siblings and I played: we would act out stories, making them up as we went. And when I doodled in my school notebooks, (I did that a lot) most of the pictures would have little stories about who or what they are. In grade 8 my English teacher wanted us to keep "Writing Diaries" and although "Stories" were not on the list of suggestions for what we could write, I ended up writing a story. As I did so, I discovered that the stories I made up got BETTER when I wrote them down. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Someone asked me recently how many books I had written. I couldn't remember and had to go look it up later. I think it's sixteen completed novel manuscripts. Something like that. :)

I don't have visual scenes "pop into my head" very often, but I find that the labor of visualizing is useful in composing fiction: getting into little details like which hand a character is using, what color their eyes are, what the room's ceiling looks like, and so forth. The decisions themselves may be arbitrary, but they build a coherence that fuels my engagement with the story. They don't even have to become explicit in the text. Sometimes I write them in and edit them out later, but just knowing them helps.

>15 paradoxosalpha: I often find myself editing out material that I needed to know in order to write the story, but the reader doesn't need to know in order to enjoy the story.

Knowing where to draw that line - that's the tricky part.

>16 ThomasWatson: as a reader I'm certainly picturing all the scenes, and I can really tell when the author hasn't because then sometimes the actions don't make sense.

>17 reading_fox: This is one of the reasons we need editors or beta readers (these days, I use both) to keep us honest. Such a scene can seem exactly right when I set it down, and later when I read it over again. But how I react to it isn't what counts in the end. What the reader gets from it is all that really matters, and I can't determine that on my own. Publishing a book without getting some input from an editor or beta reader is never a good idea. I need to know first how it works from a mind other than my own.

I have a thousand ideas for novels and such, and I'll have plenty of ideas I'll never get to write before I die.

>20 MythButton: "I have a thousand ideas for novels and such..."

I wrote a song about that. Seriously.

A thousand world of wonder are floating in my mind
A thousand worlds incorporeal, that only I can find...
Etc.

I tried singing it at a science fiction convention and got a lot of blank looks, and then finally someone piped up, "I get it, it's a writer song. My husband is a writer."

Nice touch. It kind of reminds me of the feeling I got when watching Adaptation and Whiplash, as both movies are about the struggle to achieve artistic triumph. As for poetry, I'd like to capitalize on this theme...

I walk these worlds of wonder
Fearless-faced but terrified at any tiny written blunder
Incorporeal notes need proof
Whether serious in thrills or obsessive in a postmodern spoof
May this time I'll get it right
So that none will catch the awkward typo under the booklight

>22 MythButton:
::grin::

I don't worry too much about typos. I correct them if I see them, but I hire someone who is actually good at that kind of thing to worry about eliminating them for me.

I spend a lot more time worrying about descriptions. As in: "Do I have enough?"

>23 LShelby:

The only thing I worry about is whether or not the rhymes are too unoriginal. And as far as description goes, if Paul Simon can make it with his symbolism that you just gotta phrase them the right way.

>24 MythButton: "The only thing I worry about is whether or not the rhymes are too unoriginal."

I sometimes wonder if it matters if they are original or not.

But I don't know if that discussion belongs in a "Why do you write books?" thread.

Should I start a thread about poetry? Or maybe about Original vs Expected?

I write because I feel compelled to create books, I wish I had as a child. That were representative of my experiences and had characters that looked like me. Don't get me wrong I always had a connection to reading and the scholastic book fair was hands down my favorite event as a child, but it would have been wonderful to have more cultural represented books in the 90s. I am happy for the children of today because progressive literature is becoming and more available.

I write nonfiction history - and I'm a big believer in creating the things you wished existed! :)

I write because I must. To quote (an eerily prophetic now) lyric from Jimmy Buffett- "Life and ink run out at the same time. At least so said my friend, the squid."

My belief is that all of us (human people) are born with the ability AND the desire to tell stories. That narrative impulse is part of what it means to be human, to connect to others, to imagine our world (or some other, possible world). My characters can be braver, smarter, funnier... BETTER... than I am. But at the same time, I can aspire to emulate their best qualities.

On the subject of "visualization" (above), some of my favorite moments in writing (or preparing to write) are the scenes that unfold like "movies inside my eyelids." Doesn't happen all the time, but enough that I treasure it when it does.

I write because I've done so since the age of about four when I learned the physical skill of using a pen. I just love telling stories.