A friend asked me why I’m doing this? Why am I trying to publish either through traditional means or through self publishing? Isn’t it enough just to write for myself. I told her it’s a yes or no answer. Now the rest of this is going to be more eloquent than what I told her because I’ve had more time to process and writing an answer is ten times easier than thinking on your feet and blurting it out.
The reason it’s “yes” is because as the writer and creator you really have to enjoy the story otherwise, why are you doing it? What’s the point? Go and find something you love. I write for so many reasons and most of them bring me joy or reprieve from my everyday life and even, occasionally, a break from myself. I honestly don’t know how uncreative people cope with everyday life, I really don’t. I can’t imagine going the rest of my life without being able to escape into a character and their life... I would go insane.
Now as for the “no” part of that answer, this gets a little more complicated. There’s a saying that if a writer has a story within them they have to get it out, otherwise it’s painful. To me, simply transferring the story from my mind to paper or a computer screen is not enough. That story is still solely with me unless I can share it. Being an avid reader I am immensely grateful (especially after going through the trials of publication myself) to the authors who have shared their stories with me and given me new worlds and characters to foster and grow my imagination. I want nothing more than for another person to feel the same way about one of my stories, or for them to love it as much as I do. It’s also not enough because, while I like and appreciate my day job, it takes up the bulk of my days and my energy so even if I’m dying to write, I’m at work and that demands my focus. I want to be able to spend eight, nine, twelve hours a day getting my stories out of my head, onto a page and into a readers hands and not worry that the water’s going to be shut off because I didn’t pay a bill or that the dog’s going to starve because I can’t afford food. I’ve talked about this speech before, but when Ursula K. LeGuin talked about how a writer’s true reward is freedom, I thought: “I want to live in that freedom, not just visit when I can find time.”

So yes it is enough to write what I love, but it’s not enough to keep them to myself.