Whats the true reason you write?

I don\'t mean anything simple. I\'m asking about the deeper core reason you dedicated time to making stories. Nothing like \"I enjoy it\" or \"I wanna make a career out of it,\" I\'m talking about the deeper details and what about that keeps you writing these stories. So, what\'s the true reason you write? (You can put it in a spoiler if you desire)

I\'m trying to escape and cope with my reality. I live in constant fear of never amounting to anything and writing stories (with a lot of self inserts unfortunately) helps me avoid that fear for a little while. I just keep writing to avoid and cope.

I write stories because I want to make money in attempts to influence future media. I want my work to be copied, to be used as a pool of ideas, to be a source of inspiration or a referential base. When people hear a specific word, I want them to associate it with an element used in my work. I want my writing to be the target of affectionate parodies, and virulent bile on the internet. I want people to dress up as my characters at comic-con, and write about killing them/having sex with them in fanfiction. I want my work to shape a genre, to plants seeds for a new one, or set embers for an old one.

I want to take stories where every simple solution was ignored, and explore it. Follow the different paths, paths the readers themselves thought about taking, and condemned the characters for not following. Look for the under-used path, and then explore it, and shape it so others can follow in my tread. I want to write about things that many writers fail to capture accurately, those impossible or sensitive subjects. Gender double standards, rape, trauma, war crimes, death penalties, and conspiracy theories. I want to dive into those subjects and do the impossible, write them well and invoke emotion, rather than disgust, upon completion.

Above all else, I want to open people's minds with my work and amaze them, bring tears to their eyes, make them fester with hatred, burn with passion, tremble with lust, swell with wisdom and explode into laughter.

I'm not sure why you're insistent that there has to be a deeper core reason.

A very admirable reason.

Well, if you personally don't have a deeper reason to make a story and continue writing it, that's alright.

Luckily, I've been thinking about this answer a lot in the past few days.

For a while my answer would've just been "because creating stuff is all I'm able to do." That's still kinda true today, I think, but now that I've become more confident in myself as a person, I've added another reason.

I've come to realize that the universe is just friggin' awesome and it's pretty disappointing that other people don't see that too.

So if I make short films and web series and other video-based projects that inspire other people to see the inherent awesomeness around us, then I've done my job.

And I don't just mean showing people awesome things in nature or space or whatever occurs on its own. No, I think people are awesome too, and that we humans have a lot of potential — both individually and as a species — that we don't reach for. So again: if my work can inspire people to harness that awesomeness and become awesome, then that's just... awesome.

Because sometimes my mind feels fit to bursting and unless I let it out, I get frustrated and irritated. And when it's done, even if it's just a loose scrawl of notes, I feel a sense of relief.

I'd love to earn from it, to have it as all I do, but at the moment, just generating ideas and expressing them is good enough.

To get laid...lol, the real reason is because, I dunno, my mind just naturally makes stories, and I already like drawing, ultimately, it's because it is what I enjoy doing.

Why? Simple, as well as enjoying it and enjoying the works it's based on I get just about fed up with the deluge of The Crapsack World of the Doomed Brigade, Jihad Victory, Wrist Slasher IV and a multitude of Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy works and believe in trying to write a story where the character and setting is more real, and positive, than what is written (Dirty Cops, no, portray them in a way that honors what they do, the myths of prostitution addressed straight from the horse'...ahem, mouth,) as well as address concerns I have of my own such as youth crime, trying to stop aboriginals from entering a life of crime, in as direct a manner as I can without being insensitive to those who these points might hit a little close to home. Not sugar coat playing the race card for example but not demonize indigenous people either, straight talking on difficult questions about this and provide what few answers even if they are uncomfortable or confrontational...such as it's not the race, it's the upbringing, the victim mentality, reverse racism, ect.

Originally, it was because I couldn't draw. I could see the image in my head and not make it come out through my hands properly. Writing corrected this.

Now, however, I suspect it has acquired enough momentum I simply can't stop regardless.

To paraphrase Zaphod Beeblebrox: I think it's partly for the excitement and adventure but it's mostly for the fame and the money.

All the reasons I've ever given for why I write are true: I enjoy it, I feel stories welling up inside me that want to get out, it's something I've always done since I was able to write and something I've always wanted to do since I first discovered story books, I would like to get to the point where I actually make money from it, I want to see a page with my story on it here on TV Tropes, I enjoy the escapism of stories when I read them and I enjoy escaping into the stories I write, I like to imagine myself in the universe I've created and I like creating interesting (to me) universes to escape into and explore, I enjoy creating interesting characters (well, ones that I find interesting and hope others will as well) and having them interact and come to life, I love words and enjoy playing/working with them.

I can't draw, paint, sculpt or compose music so I've got to have some medium by which I can express my creative nature.

edited 20th Jan '15 1:14:23 AM by Wolf1066

Money, Dear Boy.

No, with all honesty, I write because...I really can't imagine myself not writing. Sometimes I wonder why other people don't write stories on their own, I just can't think of any reason why I should NOT create stories, and characters, and plots, and worlds and...I just can't. And while I try to achieve success becoming a professional in this art, even if God told me that I'm just not going to make it, I would never become famous, nor succesful writing, I'd keep writing even if it's just for myself because...as corny as it sounds, to me it's like f*****g breath.

edited 20th Jan '15 7:04:36 PM by Anthony_H

I'm fictionalizing my rage and grief so that I can forgive my abusers through the adventures of the characters that would be their proxies. Fiction provides a moral gray that won't get me sucked back into a non-fictional bad situation again.

I'm inventing non-abusive good people too because I've only ever met such personalities when I read. Maybe I encounter real life good people every day, but I can't let them get too close in case I'm wrong. Fiction keeps it safe and perfect.

I think I've figured out some important things about the world and I want to try to brainwash readers into believing the same things I do.

Fiction allows me to take action based on my feelings that would be so out-of-proportion as to be impossible in the real world. So I'm basically living vicariously...through...myself...if that's possible.

I write because I want to share my vision of the world with others.

What I mean is that I want to show people (the ones who would read my stories) that, despite the horrible thing that might happen to or around us, there are many reasons to be happy and smile. I want to show people that there are a lot of good people in the world and that taking the high road is worth it. I want to share with others my vision of a world where acts of kindness, no matter how small, do more for the world than complaining about how horrible the world is.

I'm not important or famous enough to have a voice strong enough to be heard over those who yell with apathy, despair, and cynicism. That is why I hope that I'll be able to reach some people through books. I mean, that's happened to me so it could happen again, right?

So I'm basically living vicariously...through...myself...if that's possible.

The Most Interesting Man in the World does it, so clearly it is possible.

One of the main reasons is to help me ignore real life's boring or horrifying elements. For a while, I was unable to find any work of fiction I could escape into, so I began work on my own.

I'd go with that. It was almost like every writer, every film or game maker, thought we lived in such a Crapsack World and wanted to make their own so much worse.

Hmm ... I simply have a really active—and fairly detailed—imagination that creates a lot of random scenarios as time passes, and working on the details and connecting those scenes into something bigger is ... enjoyable, yes.

And making it all into stories is something to do, which is better than having nothing to do.

So in the end, the exact reason for why I write is having been raised, as the eldest child (of the eldest child, etc.), with all the things you'd think it entails, in a family of people who just don't understand that nobility and titles no longer mean anything and their traditions can be inserted ... well, you-know-where. With that and with having to put a mask on and pretend to actually care about it rather than run away, I guess it's obvious why would my imagination jump-start like that; and yes, it most likely counts as escapism, or at least had counted back then.

Well, that, and I'd been raised to engage in productive hobbies—if any—rather than negative ones, so I came to enjoy creating things and generally doing productive or quasi-productive stuff. And since that's not a negative trait to have, why bother to change it.

edited 23rd Jan '15 3:50:14 AM by Kazeto