Helen Krummenacker wrote:
People really write stories just for themselves?
I feel baffled-- writing is hard work, whereas picturing things in my head is easy, and can be done in endless variations. I write only in order to be read. The self-insertion fic in the Harry Potter universe would actually be made much more difficult because I have to write it for the other two people I'm inserting... if it was just me, I'd change the name and no one would know, but this would actually be a collaboration, making things much more complex, and then there is the question of would anyone else want to read it. I really don't want to bother committing to paper that which does not have an audience.
But one *does* have an audience: one's self. And while picturing things in one's head is indeed easy, it's also ephemeral and, unless scribbled down, forgotten. The advantage to writing, even if no one else ever sees it, is that you get to read your thought pictures as well as think them and this engages more of the brain. Writing makes the transient imaginings real, nails them down. Yes, writing is hard work, but it can also become a compulsion, an activity difficult to tear yourself away from.
Didn't Stephen King once say he wrote the stuff that *he* personally wanted to read? Considering his commercial success, probably not the best example, but it still rings true. In the end, the only reason to write at all is because you find the universe engaging enough so that there is nothing else you'd rather be doing.
This said, I can feel mighty envious of those writers out there (Hi, Sally!) who manage to engage others in their universe of choice and, at the same time, are prolific enough to make writing look easy.
Jackie