The Journal: Why Do You Write?

In today’s Journal

* Quotes of the Day
* Why Do You Write?
* Time to Start Considering Goals?
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Quotes of the Day

“[T]he world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. … I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing.” Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.” Harper Lee

“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” Gloria Steinem

“Real writers don’t write to get published. They write just to write.” Jeff Goins

Why Do You Write?

At the Kill Zone blog today, a new contributor posed the interesting question, “Why do you write fiction?”

After leaving my own response, I went on an internet search from which I gleaned the Quotes of the Day and many more.

In this Journal I often discuss what I personally consider to be the best practices of how to write fiction: writing the best story you can at your current skill level from beginning to end in one clean draft. But we seldom, if ever, discuss why we write.

When I’m writing fiction, I do so because I love my characters and I want to learn what happens next in the story they’re living.

But considering the question helped me, so I thought I’d pass it on to you: Why do you write? I hope you’ll leave a comment at https://hestanbrough.com/the-journal-why-do-you-write/. But even if you don’t leave a comment, I hope you’ll at least seriously consider the question, and that doing so will help you in some way.

Is It Time to Start Considering Goals?

Maybe it’s a little early, being only a week into November. Still, time inexorably moves forward and 2022(!) will be here before we know it. Besides, you don’t have to set goals (or resolutions) that begin on January 1. You can start as early as in the next minute or hour or day. Any of those begins a new year and the rest of your life.

Anyway, I mention this because DWS is about to succeed at his “70 in 70” publishing challenge, publishing 70 major publications with his name on the cover during his 70th year on the planet. So now he’s about to set himself another challenge, this one to begin on January 1. And that put me in mind of thinking about such things.

Naturally, my own next annual goal will be to write a million words of fiction in a year since I self-destructed on the attempt this year. Once I start writing again, my daily goal will be 3,000 words per day.

I keep track of fiction and nonfiction (Dean calls the combination of those “consumable words”) but to me only the fiction words really matter. And this year, even if I wrote 120,000 words of fiction in both November and December (4,000 words per day), I’d still fall far short of writing a million words of fiction on the year.

How about you? Do you have a particular goal in mind? A particular challenge? (Setting challenges is an excellent way to achieve goals.) Feel free to share. Your challenge might interest others too.

Talk with you again later.

Of Interest

See “Why I Write: 23 Fascinating Quotes from Famous Authors” at https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2014/03/27/why-i-write-23-quotes-famous-authors/. I also recommend clicking the Writing Tips tab to see what you might find.

See “Running and Writing” at https://killzoneblog.com/2021/11/31931.html.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………………… 570 words

Writing of WCGN 5: Tentative Title (novel)

Day 1…… XXXX words. Total words to date…… XXXXX

Total fiction words for November……… XXXX
Total fiction words for the year………… 623282
Total nonfiction words for November… 2930
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 181420
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 804702

Calendar Year 2021 Novels to Date…………………… 13
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… 1
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 66
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31

Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.