Writing is in my blood.

Maybe that sounds cheesy to you, but for those of you who read my blog, you know that I have been writing ever since I was five years old. I have thirteen years worth of stories packed away in boxes. Some fill up notebooks, others are from my earlier days or the time when I liked to scribble words in my mom's medical books with an orange crown.

So, yeah, writing is not just a hobby to me.

Hobbies can be forgotten about, and like playing the piano or collecting coins you can decide one day that you're no longer interested in doing those things but...writing is different. Telling stories is my passion, sharing the things that I write with other people is a dream.

I don't know what the future holds. I don't know if getting an agent and selling a few books will happen for me. I do know that even if it doesn't, at the end of the day, I'll still be a writer. There are people out there who think that because they don't have an agent, they're not really writers, or that writing is pointless unless you want to one day become a published author.

I can't think like that.

Yes, I want an agent.

Yes, I want to be published.

But none of those things will happen for me, if I write solely for those reasons.

I'm going to write the stories that I want to write, and I'm going to write them well. Then after I do that, I'm going to write them again. I'm going to put blood, sweat, and tears into every manuscript I write because that's what writing is all about. If you're going to write, don't half-ass anything you work on. Owe it to yourself to tell stories, and to tell them not only in the way they want to be told, but in a way that you can be proud of whenever you finish.

Tear off pieces of your soul, sit down in front of your computer, and in the words of Thomas Wolfe, open up a vein and bleed.

I write the stories that I feel are important; the stories that I want to tell because I feel that I need to hear them, and maybe one day other people will hear them too, but in the mean time, I write because I opened up a vein a long time ago, and it hasn't stopped bleeding since.

So, writers, tell me.

Why do YOU write?
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