The great American writer Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Writing, indeed, is hard work. The countless hours you put into dreaming and researching and planning and writing and revising and writing and revising (not to mention editing, proofreading and then the publication process). The experience is exhilarating, but also mentally and emotionally draining; one can become so caught up in a literary world and in the lives of characters that the veil between reality and dream dissolves. And then comes the difficulty of sharing your writing with the world…

So why, given the nature of the activity, do writers write?

For me, and I think for many writers, the desire – no, the need – to write began at an early age. Stories create story creators. The tales I heard on the lap of my governess, and the books surrounding me throughout my childhood, were enchanting and inspiring. Then, once I was of age to learn to write myself, and I came to understand that perhaps I too, some day, could write the stories I loved to hear, there was a click inside, and my entire being gravitated from that point on to the dream of writing.

From the time I could first hold a pen and control it sufficiently to create letters on a page, I have written. For me, it is an escape from the world, and a way to make sense of it. But it is more as well – it is a way to capture an essence, of life, of love, of feeling, of eternity. Writing is life itself, life embodied. Carlos Fuentes put it in stark terms: “One wants to tell a story, like Scheherazade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges of mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.”

When I write, there is a freedom and a feeling of sheer joy that overcomes me. I shape the dreams in my mind into something tangible, something I can share with others. For of course the audience is there, and is important. Some writing is for myself; a way to process thoughts and experiences. But I discovered, as a teenage girl circulating my romantic stories among classmates, that in addition to the joy of writing there is another delight: that of entertaining an audience. Leo Rosten wrote: “A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.” I would add to that, “the need to be understood, and to understand.”

I think, overall, I write because I want to live in a world in which romance exists in abundance. Were every romance book that was ever written pulped, and  every romance author to become cynical and switch to writing dark thrillers, the world would be a shade greyer. We need heroines and heroes. We need tales of love overcoming the obstacles. We need passion and compassion and happy-ever-afters. We write not so much to educate, as to comfort, inspire, share, collectively dream.

Asking why writers write is much like asking why people breathe. We have to. It is our means of living.