Why I Write

Ever since I read other people's reasons for writing, I have been thinking of my own. I write for the same reason I breathe or eat.
I write because if I don't write there is a big hole in my life, an emptiness in my soul. Before I learned how to read or write I was a writer. My Grandfather read stories to me and I would make up stories for him which he would print up on his typewriter. When I told him I wanted my stories in the magazines he read to me, we began sending them out. We'd walk together to the mail box and deposit them with great hope.
When I got my first rejection slip, my Grandfather said, "Congratulations. Now you are a professional writer. You have proof you wrote a story and sent it out." Thanks to Grandfather Patterson I've always seen my rejection slips as something positive even though I must admit once I began getting acceptance letters and checks they surpassed the rejection slips in my esteem.
Anyway, I feel anyone who writes for money is probably in the wrong career. It's wonderful getting money for something we do for love, but if we do it for money we are probably setting outselves up for a lifetime of disappointments.
There is a way to write for money and I have done it. I worked as an editor at Prentice Hall Bureau of Business Practices in New York and got paid for everything I wrote, but I kept wishing I were home working on my latest novel or nonfiction book. I don't know about other people, but for me, I need to do my own writing, that comes from my heart and my mind and my guts and to do it with love and passion and then if I get paid that is a fringe benefit.