I'd like to buy a vowel.

Recently, I met with a woman who sits in on my English class to discuss the novel I’m writing.  (Yes, I’m writing a novel!)  While we sat, discussing my intentions for the future of my story (i.e. structure, characterization, theme, and focus), she asked me a question I’ve never been asked before.  Why do you want to write?

Why do I want to write?  I don’t know.  Why does anyone want to write?  Some, I’m sure, have an obvious talent for composition that they are aware of and use it to make a living. 

Others have a passion for literature which has turned into a passion for writing, and they write because they love the beauty of language.

Still others merely seek to express their feelings in their writing.  There’s a quotation by Lang Leav which says, “I don’t think all writers are sad.  I think it’s the other way around – all sad people write.”  I think this is true to an extent; my feelings are a driving force behind my writing, but they are not always sad.

As for myself, I’m not sure if any of these apply to my own reason for writing.  There was a time, I know, when I thought that I would do well as a writer, that I could write, publish, and make a decent amount of money, all in a short amount of time.  (I’ve since learned otherwise.) 

Since I could read (at the early age of three or four), I have loved words.  My logophilia began with classics like Little Bear and later extended into short chapter books like Junie B. Jones and The Babysitters’ Club.  From sunup to sundown, I was always reading.  Car rides were never boring because I always had a book; summers would have left me pale as vanilla ice cream if my mom hadn’t made me go outside to play with the neighborhood kids.  Much to my mom’s dismay, I would often stay up way past my bedtime to read by flashlight into the early hours of the morning.   I grew up reading these foundations of language, and now I write them.

I can’t say that any one of these is the reason I write.  Maybe my reason is a combination of all of them, but I’m not confident enough in that answer to submit it as my final jeopardy, and so I cannot commit.  For now, I don’t know.

I’m sure someday I’ll figure it out, but for now I am okay with just knowing that I like something.  Sometimes, it’s enough for us to know simple truths like I like to write.  It’s enough to know who we are in our cores and that we don’t always need a reason for our passions to be our passions; they just are.