Why I Write

This was one of the prompts at our last Summer Writers’ Group, and it was a great one! Easy to write, and fun to listen to everyone else’s answers. Do you write? Why?

I write to make people laugh, and to help myself cry.

I write to educate, elucidate, enumerate and illuminate.

I write because in seventh grade, Mr. Durbin told me to never stop doing so.

Sometimes I write to reason things out for myself and others.

I’ve written a few moral inventories to save myself from myself.

Lately I’ve been writing to advertise, trying to build a dream and share it with the world.

When I was a child and young adult I wrote because I knew my brain would forget the important, terrible truths of life. Even at 5 I knew the inexorable nature of denial. It took many years to see denial differently; a tool the mind uses to protect itself.

Sometimes now I write for posterity–hoping future generations will be a fraction as grateful as I am toward previous generations efforts, to capture the present for the future’s past.