Yzabel / December 19, 2005

I’m bouncing off a comment I posted earlier on, itself triggered by several posts I had read on the NaNoWriMo forums. At times, some people would ask “what did your family/friends said when you announced you were going to write a novel in one month?”. And at times, some people would answer that they got told “what’s the point of writing a novel if you’re not going to publish it?”.Perhaps this is why there can be such a rift between authors and non-authors, artists and non-artists. As odd as it can seem to me, who love what I do both as a hobby and in the hopes of taking it onto a professional path, there are people who don’t see the point of writing just for the sake of writing.To each their own, after all (for instance, I don’t really understand why someone would like cooking for hours—I don’t like it much myself), but it got me thinking: back to the very core of the problem, we have absolutely NO way of knowing whether we’ll get published one day. We can make all the efforts needed, undergo all the mandatory steps, but there’s still no 100% certainty that our stories or illustrations someday manage to end up in the spotlight. From this point on, why bother? It’s nothing sure, so why make the effort if it’s not necessarily going to pay off in the end?The answer is so simple that it’s laughable: because we like it. Because these words are in us, and need to be left out sooner or later. Because worlds are born and die within our minds, and deserve a chance at existing outside there. Because we wield the pen and keyboard the same way craftspeople wield their tools. Because we feel like it.Whether we’re working on our writing with a professional aim in sight or just as a hobby, it’s not a road so easy to take that someone hating writing would take it just for… what? The sake of money? Nothing’s certain in the world of publication, right? Nothing tells me that I’ll be the next Rowling.Anyway, to anyone wondering why an author can write a novel without aiming at having it published, or without knowing for sure that it’ll be published, here’s the answer: we love writing. Simple as that. Quod erat demonstrandum.Just like my neighbor next door loves spending three hours in a row preparing delicious dishes that will only get wolfed down in a matter of minutes. Because we like it. Because we love it.goals, hobby, passion, reasons, writing