There are many reasons people feel drawn to write. Why did the first of our ancestors pick up some burnt sticks and scrawl images on cave walls or make marks on wood and stones in the forests of the Celtic isles? My experience tells me that there are two elemental reasons people write:

1. To learn more about themselves or their world. The writer E. M Forester once said, “How will I know what I think until I see what I say?”

2. To release some creative impulse that is inside of them. Another way to say this is, to entertain the self or others.

Writing then, is to educate or to entertain. Of course this is a simplification, but writing is something that seems more than a distraction for people who are bitten by the writing bug. In fact, people who are “writers” – published or not – would be writing anyway. It’s like the woman who came up to me at my garage sale two weeks ago and asked, “How much is that cat tower?”

“You mean the one with the big ‘FREE” sign on it?” I said. “Since it’s free, I’ll give you a dollar to haul it off, but that is as high as I’ll go… okay, I’ll give you two.”

In other words, most of us would write anyway, or pay people to be able to write. And, in fact we do, if you look at the money we spend on supplies, computers, books on writing and conferences. But then again, if we weren’t writing, what would we be doing to make sense of our worlds and get these pesky stories and feelings out? Alas, it is the curse of the writer, to write, always to write. But what a splendid curse indeed. I’ll pay my two dollars for that cat tower.