The Reasons For Writing

Mine was more seminar style. We would write stories or poems or plays and then one would be discussed during the next class period. There was almost no formal class instruction.

All of this packing and unpacking in my big move to the South has unearthed journals I have not looked at for years. I've been writing them since I was 10 years old. I've always written for me. I have notebooks of poems I've composed, for me, that I share in a class or the collection of family stories I wrote for my Dad after my mother passed in 2007.
But what good is writing - other than journals that express feelings that might best remain private, if it is to examine our acts and make sense of our lives. As I packed I often came across drawers full of thank you notes for condolence poems over the year I'd completely forgotten I'd penned. A shelf full of notebooks from classes, poetry readings, memories from my children; these journals are more vivid than any photos I shot.
All writers write to be read. That's the purpose of writing. When I was in school, the only one who read what I wrote was the teacher. No one shared, there was no such thing as author's chairs or read around groups where kids could get feedback from their classmates. We wrote in isolation.

Here, I write for all of you. I do it because I enjoy the act of writing and you tell me you enjoy reading it.
When I write for you, I do consider what you might like. Receiving comments confirms I am on the right track. But here in this place there is more than just stories of spanking, there is this lively community ready to deliver instant feedback, make requests, wish you the best when a grandmother passes or a bone breaks...And all this interaction make writing for you a wondrous privilege.
xx
Islandcarol

The reasons why we write change with the environment. I started out writing basically for myself for what may be regarded as therapeutic reasons, but my writing changed when I found that I had an audience which read my stories mainly for sexual gratification, and then it changed again when I got here and found a society of writers that cared not only for the sexual content, but also for the ways the stories were constructed and told. Much of what I have written since I got here, would not have been written - or at least would not have been written the same way - if I hadn't learnt from and interacted with other authors here.

I write to entertain and to gratify, but I think I can also say that I write to comprehend and explain. I had been trying to understand our common "interest" for almost fifty years before I started writing stories, and in the fictional form I felt - somewhat to my surprise - that I found a vehicle I could use to communicate insights and observations that I could not express in argumentative prose.

I always kidded myself that I wrote for myself. And in a sense I do; I get a story running around my head and I go mad until I actually sit down and type it out.

However.... I wrote the challenge entry.

And then....a sequel, and another sequel to the sequel.
These I can't post and they are burning a hole in my hard drive.

I think I have learnt that I write for readers rather than myself.

I think that maybe we have the wrong prospective on what is meant when say we write for ourselves.

All of my stories turn my crank you might say, and in that sense they are for me because they fulfill dreams and desires that have no possibility to actually happen. If I write something that does nothing for me it never sees publication because it never makes it past the delete button.

So in that sense all my stories are for me. When I put a story on site then I extend it out to others to deal with it as they may. The readers hopefully get as much out of it as I do, but that is something I have no control over. I love the comments and the reads which is all the part of publishing on this site, but those are just a sideline to my stories.

CS

I'm an avid reader; I spend far more time reading than I should. I suppose that it is largely escapism--I really tend to get sucked into a well written story, to the extent that when I put a book down for a while, I find myself wondering what the characters are doing while I am not there to observe them.

I am not nearly as creative as many of the writers here at the Library, but I will occasionally have a story, or story fragment, pop into my head. When this happens, I am compelled to write it down. Partly, this compulsion has to do with the same phenomenon that I described above. If I do not write the story, the images will fade, and the characters in them will gradually expire. It sounds pretty strange when I put it into words, but I think that I almost have an obligation to those characters to make their existence more real and somewhat more permanent by telling their stories. I occasionally mention that my characters write many of my stories, and there really does seem to be some truth to that. They have surprised me in mid tale more than once.

So for me, I guess that I write for myself and also for my characters. Weird.