Many Reasons to Write #MFRWauthor

There are many reasons to write. For me, there has only been one steady reason, and the other reasons have had varied levels of importance throughout my life. Now in my late forties, I can look back over many years of writing and notice a pattern.

When I started out writing silly stories in grammar school, it was because I simply loved telling them. As a child, books were my escape and comfort through the bad times everyone experiences while growing up. Back then, I wrote for love.

When I reached my teens, I still wrote for love, but I realized that writing was something I would do for the rest of my life. It was a way I connected with others and my favorite form of self-expression. At that time, I wrote original stories, but I also enjoyed writing fan fiction with my best friend, who had dreams of being a professional writer someday. Sadly, she died before even graduating high school. After that, I continued clinging to writing, again as a form of comfort and expression. Though I had an incredibly supportive family, an amazing mother who reads my work to this day, and other helpful critique partners, the loss of my friend was one of the hardest things I’ve ever dealt with.

 

Not long after my friend passed, I decided that I wanted to take a chance at a writing career. At sixteen, I started writing with profit in mind. I submitted stories. Many stories. For ten years they were rejected. Then one was finally accepted. Circlet Press was to publish Goddess of the Wine, a short erotic vampire story, in an anthology. I was thrilled, but by then I knew the chances of writing for profit were slim. After ten years of rejection slips, I’d developed a pretty thick skin, so I didn’t mind that I might never make any profit to speak of from writing, but I wasn’t about to give up, either. Call me stubborn.

Surprisingly, another acceptance followed a few years later. My novel, The Darkness Therein, was published by a new ebook company, Dark Star Publications. After that, I wrote for several ebook publishers and eventually saw decent profit from writing. I had to write a lot, though, but that wasn’t a problem for me because I’ve been lucky to never go dry on ideas.

To be honest, writing with profit foremost in mind took some of the fun out of writing, and my books didn’t sell enough that I could reasonably expect to earn a living from them. There were a lot of reasons for a decline in sales–some were my own fault, others were beyond my control. Though bitter medicine to swallow, I knew writing couldn’t be my sole focus any longer. I had to concentrate more on the day job, as well as my home life, since we were going through hard times due to health problems of a member of my immediate family. Other than some poetry and a few short stories, I stopped writing for about a year.

This past November, I started writing again, and by the end of December, completed a 106,000 word novel and worked on a short erotic anthology that is nearly ready to submit to my very patient and encouraging editor and publisher.

During that time away from writing (or away from writing with profit in mind), the love has become most important again. I’ll never stop writing, because I can’t. It’s a way of life and how I work out problems. It’s part of me.

Everyone writes for different reasons. None are right or wrong. My main reason for writing is because I love it. If I manage to sell a story, I’m happy. If a person reads my work and enjoys it, I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to touch someone. At this point in my journey, the stories and the characters are what’s most important to me, so I can honestly say I’m back to writing mainly for love again.

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