Why do I write?

Sometimes I wonder why I have this compulsion to create characters, to worry over a sentence, to make stories.  Why do I do it?  There are many answers. A list of them wouldn't be hard to make. But there's also no clear answer.

Why do we love the things we love?  And the answer to this, like the answer to why I write, is a mystery buried deep beneath the layers of reasonable and perfectly acceptable answers.

I've always loved dogs. Always loved stories--movies, comic books, and then books. I've loved people. I love some people. And the list could go on...because there are a lot of things I love but...I write out of obsession and dislocation and attraction and habit and...need...

 Writing makes me happy, sad, angry, satisfied. It feels like I have a purpose. Finish the story. I'm almost always working on something and, whatever else is going on in my life, I have this story that needs to be finished. Writing is thrilling,  difficult,  annoying; it's a lot of things at once. Maybe above all  it's compelling. Writing stories compels me to move through my days, my weeks, my months.  I want to get the damn thing finished--though of course there's always a part of me that doesn't because then I'll be pulled from the world of that story and into the uncertainty of a new story.

So in a way there is this constant in my life. The many changes, the moves and stands, the trials and the failures and successes, the life I live, always has this going on in it. A story I'm trying to tell. A story that needs to be finished. So maybe that's my best answer. I write to finish the story.