Why Are you Writing?

 Each motivation brings out a different form of writing.

Are you writing for money?

Are you writing to heal yourself?

Are you writing to heal others?

Are you writing because of all of the above?

In my life, writing has been about healing myself and understanding myself and the world better?

Why?

Partly because I grew up an only child and now I'm presently married to another only child. So, we understand each other, especially the part about vacationing as a child with no other children there at all often. So, if you didn't know how to entertain yourself you could be very very bored. So, both of us being resourceful intelligent people we got busy learning how to entertain ourselves so we wouldn't get bored.

However, this was before Color Television was worth watching which was around 1960 when it got good and I was 6 years old in 1954 before we even had a television also. So, no Home computers, no internet, no cell phones, no social media at all.  So, we all just thought whatever we thought and were not influenced AT ALL by any social media which was nice at the time. We took hikes in the mountains, we climbed mountains, we went to the beach, we learned to surf etc. So, we looked to nature to heal us and to strengthen us always. My Present wife and I had this experience because I grew up mostly in Glendale in the Los Angeles area and she grew up mostly in Santa Barbara which is a somewhat similar experience regarding the ocean at the very least. She grew up sailing on a concordia and I started sailing at age 20 on my cousin's Columbia 22 which slept about 6 people camper style on board. We sailed to Catalina Island to Avalon Harbor and to Emerald Cove which was really good for snorkeling and Scuba diving.

So, my present wife and I shared this love of the wild open spaces of the ocean and my wife's father sailed his Concordia in the Transpac to Hawaii also during this time with a crew and finished the race with everyone still liking each other. We did hear of one boat that didn't bring enough food and water and everyone was pissed with each other without enough food or water trying to lighten the load to be able to win the race though. Those folks likely never spoke to each other again after that.

So, the main point of this article is to define your motivations for writing.

Why?

So, you can better understand exactly what you are doing and your motivation for writing. Once you do this you can write better much better whatever it is you want to write about.