Here’s a great piece on The Rumpus by Stacey D’Erasmo that explores why writers keep writing:
But how does the writer make the long haul? As I go on through the gates of novel three, novel four, I find that I am increasingly interested in this question. Something changes. Something shifts: How do I keep doing this? I don’t suffer from an excess of self-confidence, nor rage, nor purity of spirit. Doors have opened for me, but other doors have remained closed. I have had as many reasons to stop as I have had to continue. Yet I always chose the latter, without hesitation. This may be a matter of temperament, astrological alignments, a warp in my DNA, psychology, race, class, the weather on a certain day in 1974—who knows? But, though I have certainly doubted my talent and my ability to pull off what I am trying to do, I have never doubted my conviction that the pursuit itself, the vocation, was the path I had to be on. This business of making sentences, images, scenes—it is so constitutive of my being that I hardly know who I would be without it. Writing is like my Siamese twin: freakish, alive, weighty, uncanny. Were we to be separated, I doubt that I could survive it.
“Stop now? After all this? Are you crazy?”—I guess my answer makes as much sense as anything else does.
