Why Do We Write? ~by Cp Bialois

That depends on who you talk to. We each have a different thought or belief on why we sit down and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

To be honest, we could ask a hundred different writers and receive a hundred different reasons, but they all generally boil down to one thing: we want to make the world a better place.

 
And this is where the debate generally starts. Not because our ideas are so different, but because one group usually doesn’t understand the other.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and we all do it at some point.

We write our stories, our babies, and think the world of them. We pamper them, scold them when they don’t cooperate, package them so they’re presentable, then send them off into the world to find their way. If we’re lucky, they’ll make a positive impression on people and will be fondly remembered. If not, well, not everyone’s going to agree with us.

But there’s another way to take it, and it’s what often draws a line between the two.

The Literary vs. the Fast Food Style

Stephen King once said, “I’m the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”

That simple line explains everything perfectly. While there are those that seek to be remembered in literary circles as geniuses along with greats like Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemmingway, most fit into the fast food style of writing.

The fast food style is based on having fun. We sit down to write what we believe will be a fun story for others to read and provide escapism. For us, offering the chance for others to escape their daily lives for a couple of hours at a time is the goal. And it does make a difference.

Sure, it may not be loftier than those wishing to change the world with broad strokes, but there can’t be broad strokes without hundreds, thousands, or millions of smaller, narrower strokes converging to create something larger.

We’re doing the same thing. We’re all doing our part to improve the world in some way. But is that all we’re doing?

Writing is fun

One thing I love stressing to other writers when they’re starting out is writing is our playtime. It’s like when we were kids playing with our toys and created our own stories. It’s our excuse to forget our problems and let our inner child come out and play.

It’s so easy for us to stress ourselves out over anything going wrong in our process, and sometimes remembering why we’re doing this is all it takes to balance things out.

Is there really any better way to relax and find our muse than going back to when we used to create for the fun of it?


Listen to Cp Bialois' podcast episode here.