Trust author/editor/columnist Ed Gorman to sum up best why we writers write… and why most of us are also such voracious readers…
If only I loved the writing BUSINESS as much as I do the writing itself. But because I’m not a star it’s scary. It never was, oddly enough, in my first two decades. There were rejections, dust-ups, bad patches. But like most of my fellow full-time writers, I had the sense that things just always took care of themselves. Candide. I wrote, and write today, not for money, fame or immortality. But just because telling stories is so much fun, whatever the fate of those stories might be.
Every once in a while, when the worry termites start gnawing their way through my mind, I refresh myself by sitting down and reading the same kind of writing that made me want to be a writer in the first place….The business can cut you deep. But pure fine writing can heal you up as many times as you require.