Why bother?

I keep hearing about how writers need to create platforms so their readers can find them, understand them, love them yet more, and get advance notice of upcoming titles and book signings and speaking events.

Well, I'm not a published writer — not yet. I'm not even a self-published writer. But I wanted to start this blog because when you write, you think almost all the time about the business of writing. Storytelling; plotting. Characters, motives, action and reaction.... Imagined conversations run through your head. Your mind becomes a movie screen and you see your characters' scenes played out on that. I have so many questions as well.

The first question is one I think about each day when I wake up: Why bother? Why do this? Being a writer is filled with constant, solitary effort, and rejections, so many of the latter that you learn to make a friend of it. Second to parenting, it's the hardest thing I've ever attempted, yet millions strive to do this. Why?

Three sayings help propel my life these days.

The ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories. I came up with this, corollary to the other one I love: "God created man because He loves stories." I want to write because each person you meet, no matter how obscure or ordinary, is a fountain of stories — about himself, his experiences, the people he knows. That's a big reason to love humanity, I think. (There are very few people I dislike and, when I do, the reasons are usually valid and profound).

Paraphrasing Hemingway: "Your job is not to tell what happened, but to make the reader feel it all happened to him." This is why it's hard work, why it's got to be "show, not tell," why it's about conflicts and compression and yearning. Our lives are filled with people reporting, "OK, here's what happened," but to make the reader feel "Oh my God, what would I do if this were me?!" sets a very high bar. And I like a challenge.

"Rise and shine, buttercup. This damn thing won't write itself." Well, that's the long and short of it. I have to persist and write every day, or else it'll get put off and sidetracked and dismissed, and nothing will get done. One scene per day, or one page each day, means over 360 scenes or 360 pages by the end of a year. My first book took me three years to complete; the second one, nearly a year; the third one, seven months. I'm trying to get this next one done within a season.

What about you? Why do you bother? What keeps you going?