Why do writers write?

1. Attention. A more mature aspiration in this regard would be the recognition and respect of critics and one’s peers. Most of us just want a lot of people to tell us how special we are.

2. If a male writer, to get laid. This is especially true if you teach in an MFA program in creative writing. Creative writing programs are full-up with dreamy eyed women still young enough to succumb to the purple-est of prose or naïve enough to be impressed by the short story collection you published seven years ago that sold 940 copies in hard cover, but is still listed on Amazon.

3. To indulge your most embarrassing fantasies. You’d be humiliated to tell your friends about the recurring daydream in which you, bare to the waist and armor pec-ed, slaughter a dozen men twice your size with your magical sword nicknamed “Big Hard One” and then make love to the harem of grateful, huge-breasted alien women you just saved from rape and ruin. But if you put it in a screenplay, suddenly people talk about you like you have a respectable job rather than wasting your day spinning spank material.

4. To go on an uninterrupted, book-length rant without having to answer annoying questions about your weak premises, faulty logic and questionable conclusions.

5. To publicly embarrass your family with plausible deniability. Of course the drunken whore who slept with her brother and stole his inheritance isn’t Aunt Betty. The character’s name was BETSY.

6. Because if we didn’t write, we’d have to work. I know we claim that writing is hard work, but can we really compare writing with hauling buckets of mortar up a ladder in the sun all day or gutting chickens on an assembly line for a living? No.

So why do YOU write?