Although I can’t speak for the big names, I’m confident money isn’t what drives most writers. For many of us, writing begins as a necessity — a way to express something to ourselves. And as we go further, the need to share it with others soon follows. Words, pictures, and feelings start to swirl in our heads, and we feel compelled to turn them into something coherent. If we’re lucky – or perhaps unlucky – enough to persist, writing becomes a mission and a reason to keep going.
Where we start — anywhere along the wide spectrum of morality — shapes how the picture takes form. Writing is like painting by numbers: as you join the dots, an image emerges. If it matches your expectations and moral compass, you’re encouraged to connect more dots to make it sharper.
But joining those dots is never as simple as it sounds. You may revise the same passage dozens of times and still doubt it. Sometimes, you just have to take a leap of faith and accept what you have. But time is often the best judge. Reading your own work months later — when you’ve almost forgotten it — lets you see new nuances. Sometimes they’re small, but sometimes they’re so fundamental that you have to start over. These struggles are rarely about language, which can usually be fixed. They’re sometimes about the facts anf figures we have or don’t have or about deeper questions of morality and authenticity at other times.
Sharing our feelings and opinions in public forces a kind of self-control. It tests how true we are to ourselves. When we write from the depths of our soul, we discover that vulnerability and arrogance can strangely coexist. Vulnerability lies in sharing our rawest feelings. Publishing them is the ultimate exposure. Arrogance — or perhaps narcissism — lies in believing that strangers will care about what we have to say.
This is just the beginning. Publication changes how we see our own words — an unpredictable mix of pride, doubt, and the urge to write again. And as we keep writing, we find ourselves chasing perfection — a perfection that may never exist for the author, even if readers believe they’ve already found it.