Why Write?

It's an interesting question to consider, why anyone would write for others to read. Writing to make a living requires not only talent and dedication, but also a fair dose of luck – the better you are, the less luck you need, but you will always need luck. So writing with the express intention to make money from it is either foolish, or optimistic (or perhaps better to say “hopeful”).

I felt moved to write about why I write when, as I do from time to time, I was re-reading a collection of essays by Isaac Asimov. Most of these collections are compilations of his regular science fact feature from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (often referred to simply as F&SF, though that is subject to confusion with a description of a literary genre), which might be billed as science fact, but often contained things that took a certain departure from that brief. Each essay begins, almost invariably, with some anecdote from Asimov's own experience.