Goodreads asked C.J. Penn:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

C.J. Penn For me, the best thing about being a writer is ... well, there's really not just one thing. It's more like a basket full of things, such as:
- Opening the stopper on bottled up creativity and just letting the creative ideas flow. Though I only tried this a couple of times, there is a method attributed to Hemingway (yet likely not from him), where he supposedly advised to write drunk and edit sober. I'm not advocating drunk writing, but if a little beer or wine helps the creativity flow, maybe it's not a bad thing.
- I also love editing. It feels like taking a crude clay sculpture, removing the ugly parts, adding some improved parts, and ending up with something a whole lot better than what you started with. And for some reason, I really enjoy deleting "junk." There's some advice from the Bible that goes something like this: "The more the words, the less the meaning. And how does that profit anyone." I tend to try to write that way.
- My time is my own, at least while I'm writing.
- It gives me the opportunity to share ideas with other people, through blog posts or books I write. And my writing, always with a strong Christian theme (though maybe not a traditional theme to some), fills me with a passion to share.
- Speaking of passion, I really enjoy the passion that goes along with writing.
- And I'll stop with the last thing that popped into my head: the experience of creating new worlds and new people. And then, once the characters are created, getting to know them and then looking to them to guide me in how to write their story.

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