Why I Write

It's summer (no stay-at-home-mom of school-aged kids needs this reminder). It has not been a season of prolific creativity and productivity for me. More like road trips, incessant bickering, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That's okay. I'm forever grateful for these years, and for my presence in them. I'm not complaining. But I do miss writing. It's been weeks since I've had those long, quiet, isolated hours before the screen. All I have time for right now are quick bursts of words, dumped into a blog in the early morning hours before the monsters begin to stir in their lairs.

I needed something easy, something to get the juices flowing, something to get me writing. Writing about writing is about the easiest thing there is for a writer, so here it is: a summer series on Why I Write.

Why I Write Fiction, Why I Write Young Adult, Why I Write Historical, and others are planned and coming shortly.

Today, I'll tell you simply why I write.

1. I enjoy it. 

Every part of it. I love to feel the throb of a story aching to coming out, and the gush of words when I finally put fingers to the keyboard. I love the fine-tuning, the hours spent staring at a paragraph, a line, a word, even when I return to it the next day and decide to delete it.

I also love the hard, intellectual labor, the constant refining, and the continuous learning. I know I'll never know all there is to know about writing, and that knowledge pushes me, awakens me, and drives me.

It gives me something to work at until it's finished. I know what I'm going to do every day, from the moment I wake up.

It gives me purpose. It makes me feel useful to my Lord, who has given me the luxury of time, freedom, and a gift with words.

2. It keeps me close to the Lord. 

Not because I think writing, in and of itself, is so noble and godly a thing to do, but because I'm constantly talking to him about it. Is this a fitting labor? I ask. Does it please You? Take this dream from me if it's not from You, I beg him.

I ask for practical things too: for my time to be well-used, to be kept from distraction, for Him to show me what's missing, and what to cut.

I confess my sin to him: my pride, my shame, my hesitancy, my laziness, my fear of man.

When I get frustrated by what I perceive to be silence, as I often do, I back away from writing. I can't help it. My confidence wains, my work slows, my heart constricts.

And like clockwork, my prayer life dries up.

But I am always (so far) pulled back somehow to the labor of writing, and with it, I return to praying as I should.

I realize anew with every return, that if my writing never amounts to anything in the wide world, if it never yields earthly fruit that I can see, and taste, and spend, it doesn't matter. My writing bears the kind of fruit that matters to God. It keeps my heart tuned to His grace, mercy, and sovereignty.

3. I can't not. 

Writing is quite possibly the most all-consuming activity I could have undertaken. Even when I have to remove myself from the screen and do normal things that normal people do, I'm consumed by writing. I may have a day that's full with bible study, and picking up my husband's uniform at the cleaner's, and shopping for ingredients to make minestrone soup and homemade bread for my friend who just had a baby, but all those things are punctuated by thoughts of my story. Dialogue streams through my mind as I drive. I feel the sun on my character's skin when I feel it on my own. I use my one precious hour alone to unload it all into the Word document, and read it over fourteen times to make sure I like it.


Whether or not God does anything with it, I think, for me, there will always be writing. It's a part of who I am. It's a part of how I function. The tap has been turned on, and it flows constantly for me.



And that's why I write.