Why Do We Write?
My youngest daughter got engaged last week, which means it’s been an intense weekend, with lots of hugs and joyful tears and gratitude and hope and excitement for the future. At the end of the weekend, a friend said to me: This was so much intense emotion. Are you going to use that in a novel?
The question stopped me short, because it made me think about the many times in my life I’ve felt driven to write, in order to process intense emotion. And yet it’s almost always been because I needed to process something hard , something that knocked the steel from my knees and the breath from my lungs. For me, writing my way through painful experiences helps me regain my equilibrium; happy feelings don’t elicit the same need.
https://writerunboxed.com/2026/04/08/why-do-we-write-2/
