Who’s Driving this Thing, Anyway?

Here’s a question for you:

What drives a writer to write?
More specifically, what drives you to write?

Let’s think ….

• Inspiration. You just have to write. You have this burning need to express yourself in words, to put it all on paper, and you feel unfulfilled if you don’t spend some of your time with your pen or your keyboard. Writing is your life.
• Money. Not to be mercenary about it, but you write for the money. You might be a novelist, a blogger, a copywriter, or a technical writer, but basically, you’re writing to put food on the table–it’s simply be a job. (Or a career, but that distinction is for another time.)
• Order. Sometimes, putting things down on paper (or, on screen on the computer, of course), helps you make sense of the world. It helps you organize your thoughts, spell out a goal, identify the steps to that goal. Writing helps you get all your ducks in a row.
• Thinking. Not to be confused with putting things in order, but just … getting ideas out of your head and safely contained on paper. Just the act of a free form flow of ideas, stream of consciousness, just letting words spill out as you try to summon up something creative or to nail down something complex helps you clarify and explore the possibilities.
• Fun. Because you think playing with words is fun. Putting uncommon combinations together, playing with the sense of sounds as the words whoosh through your head. Finding new descriptions, analogies, metaphors and even, God help us, new puns … just because it’s mind-stretching, vocabulary-busting, good-time-having fun thing to do.

Then, there’s my favorite.

Because you CAN. There is so much bad writing out there. Websites. Books. Magazine articles. Emails. Ads. Flyers. Signs. Blog posts. Forum messages. So many of them are, well, bad. Poorly conceived. Grammatically shaky (at best). You might restrain yourself from mentally editing the–they’re not worth your time–but you do mentally congratulate yourself for knowing that you can do better.

I don’t mean in the armchair-quarterback kind of way, where you put down a practically illiterate book and think, “I can do better.” No, I mean where you actually DO better. Where you actually WRITE, instead of just talking about it.

Because you can’t be a writer if you don’t write.

So–did I miss any reasons? What other reasons are there to write?