Why people write

How do you explain the fact that so many people write books that are never published? Or they are published, perhaps even financed by the authors themselves, but read by almost no one?

Thousands of books are published each year, yet thousands more are written and unpublished, or started and never finished, or envisioned in someone's mind but never put down on paper. How many people say something like, "I could write a book ..."?

Alfred Kazin

Perhaps the answer to all such queries can be found in the words of literary critic Alfred Kazin: "In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself; to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax."

The actual publication of a book is, in so many instances, truly anticlimactic. This is probably not true of professional writers, those who actually make their living by writing books. If their books are not published, their families don't eat.

Yet for amateur writers — those who write books to see if they can, those who have a story that is burning inside them, those with ideas bursting to get out — the actual writing, not the illusive possibility of publication, is the true objective.