Xjyuk

Writing can be a very difficult, frustrating, stressful and effortful process. It can also be very isolating to the writer. Given that writing is a form of communication, what is the point of writing material that you're pretty sure no one else will ever read? Isn't it a complete waste of your time and effort?

Note: I saw this question posed in the comments to another question. I decided to post it as an official question --even though I have an answer in mind --because I feel NOT knowing the answer to this question was, for a long time, the biggest barrier to my growth and success as a writer. Other people's answers are welcome --this continues to be something I struggle with emotionally, even though I've embraced it intellectually.

For many years --decades actually --my goal with every piece of writing I wrote was that it be read and appreciated by someone. There were plenty of things I wrote that didn't achieve that goal, and ended up moldering away in some corner of my hard-drive, but I viewed those projects as failures. I write to connect with other people, and anything that doesn't do that isn't worth the effort --or so I thought.

Ironically, it was my day job as a programmer that taught me differently. Often, as a programmer, you can spend months of work coding something that never goes into production. Surprisingly, that never bothered me that much --because I viewed every project as a learning project. Whether or not the code was used, it taught me new things about how to be a better programmer. The same applies to writing. Every word you write potentially teaches you to be a better writer --if you approach it as someone ready to learn. And you can't be a good writer without going through all those pages of writing first. Writing projects that are never read aren't failures. They're learning opportunities. The only failed projects are the ones that you don't learn anything from.

I'm a late convert to worldbuilding, and the Iceberg Theory, which states that we must know far more about the world of our story than we put on the page (and like many late converts, I've been evangelical about it recently!) but I do think this goes even beyond the richness of story that can result from doing plenty of extra research and worldbuilding before writing. The writing you do doesn't necessarily have to be backstory, or even be directed towards a certain project in order for it to be worthwhile. The practice of good writing --and the process of becoming a better writer --is a worthy goal in of itself. And it's a mistake to think you can get to the good writing by avoiding the bad writing. Quantity leads to quality.

For me, writing is a passion. Not writing is an impossibility. There are stories in my mind; I need to tell them. I need to find out where they go, how they go, what they mean. I have something in mind when I start a story, but it changes, mutates, I do not fully understand it until it is written and finished.

I find out what I think and how I feel about complex issues (moral, philosophical, political) by writing about them, directly or indirectly. A story lets me ask complex "what if"s, that lead me deeper into an issue. I can play with ideas, explore them, travel down untrodden paths to find out what lies at their end.

Writing is a process, and I enjoy every bit of that process. The research, the editing, the sketching down of hasty ideas and drawing lines between them, the bouncing of ideas against longsuffering friends - every part of the process of creation. I love it, because it is a process of creation.

Of course I want an audience. A story is to be told to someone. Otherwise, is there a story? A story that isn't told is like sheet music that's never played - it is a promise unfulfilled. I am made uncomfortable by books that don't get opened - they are there to tell stories, not to sit on a shelf!

However, while I write, I do not ask myself whether this thing will get published. For one thing, I myself might decide that this half-finished creation project is not good, and consign it to the dark pit of oblivion in a "nah" folder. Multiple mythologies speak of the gods making multiple attempts and scraping them before arriving at a final creation. My story, my prerogative.

And then, the thing is, in our digital world there isn't really such a thing as "no-one will ever read this", unless that's the fate you yourself want for a particular story. You might be unable to sell it. You might be unable to have it published traditionally. I'm sure as heck going to try - like I said, I very much want an audience. But I do not look to earn my bread through writing. So if all else fails, I can just post my stuff on the web, and proceed to write the next thing.

Of course I'm learning and I'm getting better as I write. But honestly, that's not something I look at. I do not write now so that "one day" I can write better. I write because writing is a fire in my bones right now.

Writing is not a passion for me, not at all. I never wanted to be a writer.

I wanted to be a scientist, and I became a scientist. As a scientist, I spent much of my life learning. Through learning (whether through direct learning or through teaching which is also a form of learning), I came to see that life is more worthwhile if we actually grow during the process of it.

My science career wound down, and I switched to writing. And frankly, because I'd been in science for so long, I had the good fortune of having a birds' eye view into numerous scientific things--I had hobnobbed with Nobel laureates and the like, partied with present-day galileos and so on and so forth.

And the thing all of us would agree on, including not only the smarty pants but also my collegial teachers in the CC system (who are smartypants in their own ways), is that learning is the key.

So, with science done but a decently-fit and trained brain, thanks to the investment of US tax dollars, writing (fiction) became the next thing. I'm learning.

My vocabulary is expanding. My facility with sentence structure, paragraph structure, character arcs and so on. I'm meeting new people--artists--who also agree that trying new things (another word for learning) is good.

I have plenty of published papers. Some of them are barely cited. Possibly not even read. That's OK--they are part of the official record of peer-review. Other articles, decades old, are still cited dozens of times each year. That tells me that work I did ages ago is being discovered now, by people to whom it's useful.

If my fiction has even a handful of readers, that will outstrip the number of readers of some of my research. And since a low readership (from those papers) is my benchmark, that'll be a win.

So I write for all of those reasons. Not much of a useful answer, but I wrote it anyway.

What is the point of going to the gym, when you know you will never compete in the Olympics?

You do it because it is fun, it is entertaining, and it is good for the soul.

If you write to become the first great american author, 1. you will fail, 2. you will not write, 3. the process wouldn't even be fun.