Why Writing Is Important

Writing can change your life. Writing can even save a life.

Writing helps you get in touch with your inner child. Writing your observations about people and places helps you notice and appreciate your surroundings.

"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living," Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said.

And Joan Didion said, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means - what I want and what I fear."

Roger Rosenblatt, in his recent interview on PBS, stated, "We write to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable and love possible."

We write because we must, loving the process rather than the product since we rarely become rich or famous in today's publishing world. Writing gives meaning to our lives and connects us to the universe. The process of writing becomes our personal vision quest.

"The writer is a person who is standing apart," Anne Lamont said.

Writing allows us to live like the artist who appreciates sensory details in the environment. It gives us perspective about our place in the world, where we've been, where we are, and where we're going; and it allows us to evaluate our lives in ways we wouldn't otherwise. It makes us much more observant, and this sense of wonder, of seeing things new, of taking notice of our world and ourselves changes us for the better.

There is enormous value in writing one perfect sentence. As a fiction writer or poet, we are painting a word picture to tell a story and these images have the power to make a difference in the lives of our readers.

Writing connects us to the world, to others, and to ourselves.

That is why we write.