Why Does Anyone Write? | Literary Hub

I didn't set out to be a writer. As a child, being a novelist seemed like the most exalted possible career but it was like wanting to be a movie star, a wildly unrealistic dream. I remember the first time I found myself utterly immersed in telling a story, a dystopian sci-fi piece I wrote for a school assignment, in which humans left their environmentally-degraded planet in search of a new home aboard vast intergalactic spaceships called Arks. I was moved by the plight of my characters, awed by the immensity of the universe I had conjured into being, and heartbroken by the tragedy and sacrifice that lay at the heart of their mission. The fact that it was buttock-clenchingly sentimental tripe did not change the fact that writing it gave me flow, that elusive experience of total absorption in a mental activity, completely removed from my other worries and preoccupations. And finishing it gave me all the satisfaction of creation: here was a story that I had brought into the world, a tiny yet complete work of "art" which would never have existed had I not written it.