Why write?

In honor of Bittercon (The BitterCon LJ community, open to everyone who's missing a convention anywhere this weekend),

kateelliott  (and btw, if you haven't read her Crown of Stars series, you've missed out.  Go on, run and get 'em!) asked on her LJ the other day:  Why do you write?  And perhaps even more importantly, if you knew there was never a chance of being published, would you still write?  And other assorted questions.

 

 Provoked an interesting discussion on the many reasons why writers write.  It seems the #1 answer is "Because I must or my brain will explode with all these people and worlds living there." Or something to that degree.

 I, for one, got caught up in the needing-to-be-published craze in order to feel validation for my writing.  I'm trying to get away from that and get back into the writing-because-I-love-it phase.  My foremost concern while crafting a story was, "Will this hook an editor?"  Instead of "I love this character and this world and I want to write this story about them."  Well, you can see why my writing got snarfed, can't you? 

I read through a story this weekend that's now been rejected 6 times.  And you know what?  I love the story.  Every time a rejection comes in, I think I need to go through and re-do the story, change this and that and most of it so the next market will accept it.  (I haven't yet, just pretty minor revisions).  But in the end, I've told the story I wanted to tell and it touches me deeply every time I read it.  And sometimes, that's got to be enough, doesn't it?

What do you think?  Why do you write?