Why Do I Write The Stories I Write?

Well, that's a loaded question, and there's no easy answer.

I've spent most of my life building worlds in my head. Places I'd like to visit. Lives I'd like to live. Moments I'd like a second chance to do over. Entire stories unfolding while I stared out of a classroom window, or on long Sunday drives with my parents, while folding laundry, and washing dishes. If I'm being completely honest, I've always been a bit (a lot) of a daydreamer.

Eventually, the stories became too big to keep to myself. I felt like if I didn't get them out right now, my brain was going to explode. Literally.

Like a lot of writers of my generation, I started with fanfiction. Then came NaNoWriMo, along with an embarrassing collection of half-finished novels that will never see the light of day. I wrote because I loved it, because the stories were there and they wanted out, and, quite frankly, as a shy, introverted teenager, I had nothing better to do with my time than lose myself in another world.

Then my dad was diagnosed with ALS. I watched him struggle. I watched him die.

The daydreaming stopped. The stories disappeared. Writing, reading, anything even remotely entertaining felt unimportant when compared with what was happening in front of me.

I thought my world had fallen apart, but life had other plans.

I got married. I moved across an ocean. I became a mother. Then a mother again. Then again.

Without really noticing it at first, I started daydreaming again. I imagined futures for my kids. I made up bedtime stories, silly little fairy tales about precocious little girls who don't eat their peas, and brave little boys who can't talk but can still defeat a cookie stealing goblin. The stories evolved, got bigger, more complex, and ever-so-slightly out of hand, if I'm being honest. Soon, during a very long drive home from holiday, I found myself talking about writing again. I started brainstorming with my husband. I dusted off the laptop (actually, splurged on a new one) and bought a ridiculous amount of stationary.

Life itself became my inspiration. The stories I write aren't completely made-up stories. They're shaped by my life, by my experiences and memories.

A boy taking care of his profoundly autistic little brother in a dystopian world grew out of my worries about how my own son might live in a world that isn't built for people like him, and how he'd survive in a future ravaged by humanity's bad decisions.

A teenage girl balancing school, friendship, and the slow loss of her father grew from memories I wish I'd never had to make, that still haunt me twenty year later.

The details may be fictional, but the emotions are 100% real. The fear, the anxiety, the hope, the love. All of it, 100% genuine, 100% me.

I write because stories help us understand lives we haven't lived. They allow us to step into someone else's shoes for a little while and develop a little more empathy (hopefully). Sometimes they help us escape from our own realities, when life becomes just a little too hard to bear.

I write for the people who don't often see themselves at the centre of a story, and for the characters who have spent years living in my imagination. I write for my children, my family, and myself - the little girl with a million worlds running rampant through her mind, the young woman struggling to cope with loss, the mother fighting for her children, the person who doesn't want to feel like a failure anymore.

Mostly, though, I write because after all these years, I still love it.