Why Write? An Overview of Motivation
One thing I hate to admit is that I don’t have a wonderful content calendar with months and months of scheduled posts. Best case scenario, I’ve planned for the next two weeks. Most of the time, I’m sitting in my office Monday morning (or Sunday night, in this case) desperately seeking something to write that might somehow be helpful to someone.
I’m not convinced I hit that mark very often.
So that leads me to a question that I want to explore today and over the next few weeks: Why write? Why bother with this blog? Why post anything at all? This wouldn’t be the first blog to just go silent and fade from existence. Heck, it wouldn’t even be the first blog I started to go the way of the buffalo (though conservation efforts have managed to bring American Bison populations back quite a bit, which is nice).
“Why?” is a question I’ve dealt with a lot lately, as my 2-year-old son is right at that sweet spot of wanting to know how everything connects with everything else.
“Why are you cooking, Daddy?”
“Why are we driving?”
“Why is that car black?”
“Why do you have to go to work, Daddy?”
So, why write?
The short answer is because I can. Or rather, to prove to myself I can. My readership is really small. I’m pretty sure it’s mostly my mom, my older sister, and potentially a few other close friends and family members. It may never grow, and that’s OK. This blog isn’t about reaching millions of people or building a massive platform. I’d love for those things to happen, but for now, I just want to remind myself that I can add something of value
And though I’m not convinced I hit that mark very often either, maybe along the way I’ll inspire someone who can.
But man, there are times when I really don’t want to. There have been posts that didn’t go live until Monday evening, even though the end goal has always been posting Monday before 10AM central time. I think my second or third post was a Tuesday, actually. But here’s a secret: you will always have more reasons not to write than you will to write.
That’s not a well kept secret, I know, because it applies to almost every productive task you could set out to complete. Exercise, eating healthy, studying for an exam, going back to school, really playing with your kid instead of scrolling Twitter while he entertains himself, starting a business… There will always be excuses not to. Sometimes they will be fully valid, great, logical, healthy reasons to pull back. But whether or not they are good, the reasons to stop will always be there, and—in my experience—they always outnumber the reasons to persevere.
But writing is worth the effort. I can’t even really explain why. I just know that it is.
Writing allows you to feel god-like powers of creation, while simultaneously humbling you enough to expose your soul to anyone who chooses to open your book, click on your post, read your work.
Writing allows you to communicate with others in ways no other format can. If I talk to you, you hear me telling you something. If I write to you, my words take up a brief residence in your mind as you tell them to yourself. That’s intensely intimate and beautiful. It requires complete strangers to share a little bit of trust in one another.
Over the next few weeks, I want to dive deeper into some of those reasons why I write. I hope to convince those of you who also write to write more, and those of you who do not write (welcome, by the way; I’m shocked but delighted you are here!) to take a chance on a new hobby.
