Why do you want to write?

I moved to San Francisco in the summer of 2000, during the last gasp of the dot-com boom, with the ambition of becoming a high-tech beatnik. I had a copy of Dan Pink’s “Free Agent Nation” in one hand, and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” in the other. (I’m moderately embarrassed to admit that this is not hyperbole, this really happened.)

My dream was to code by day and write by night, with long trips to South America, Yosemite, and Europe breaking up the work.

The problem was that I didn’t know how to write. Writing was critical to the identity I was crafting for myself, so I signed up for a non-fiction writing class with Ethan Watters at The Grotto.

I spent most of the ten weeks working on an essay about a poorly-planned solo backpacking trip, which was representative of exactly the type of story I was most interested in telling – travel adventures about me. As long as I kept having adventures, I would have things to write about, so I was incentivized to keep having adventures. Perfect.

Once the class ended, I realized that my design had a fatal flaw. When I asked myself, “Why do you want to write?” my answer was “So that I can tell people I’m a writer.”

Writing fit the identity I was crafting. I liked the idea of being a high-tech beatnik, so I worked backwards from the identity and started writing. However, I quickly found out that the key to writing sustainably is passion. I liked the process of writing, it seemed that I was reasonably talented, but there wasn’t a burning drive inside me to tell the stories I wanted to tell. I ended up putting my writing down for about eight years, returning to it first in 2008 when I started gardening and then more regularly in 2009 when I started Knowledge Architecture.

There are a million things I’ve learned about writing over the last three years, many of them can be found in books like “Bird by Bird,” “If You Want to Write,” “On Writing,” and even “Made to Stick.” Those books will give you great advice about the mechanics of writing. More important though, is understanding the psychology of writing. For example, how do you keep writing when you are not getting comments on your blog?

That’s why I believe the question “Why do you want to write?” is the most important question you can ask yourself. (A close second is “Who is your audience?”)

If you are deeply driven to solve a problem, learn about people, or serve an audience you’ll tap into a renewable source of energy that will not only feed you through the ups and downs of writing, but also lead you to content.

I have a backlog of posts I want to write in a folder in my e-mail box, largely inspired by interactions I have on a daily basis with interesting people. I want to write because I want to tell those stories and uncover the invisible threads linking them together. How about you?