Why do you want to write a book?

If you're asking yourself why you want to write a book, the answer matters more than the plot, the outline, or the publishing plan. It decides whether you finish. Some reasons burn bright for three weeks and leave you staring at Chapter Four. Others keep you in the chair for a year. The difference isn't how noble the reason sounds. It's who the reason is for.

You have answered this question at a party. You said something about always having loved stories. That was true, and it was also the answer you rehearsed in the car.

You have a private answer too. It involves your name on a spine, a table at the front of a bookstore, and one specific person from high school walking past it.

You have felt a little embarrassed by the private answer. You have also noticed it's the one that gets you up at 5:00.

Until about week three.

We know. Our private answers had a bookstore table in them too.

Two kinds of why

In Circle 1 for Authors, the reasons writers give fall into two piles. An Ego-Why is about what the finished book will do for you: the byline, the proof, the moment someone finally takes you seriously. A Service-Why is about what the finished book will do for someone else: the reader who needs the thing you learned the hard way.

Neither one makes you a better or worse person. Everybody has an Ego-Why. The trouble is that it runs like sugar. It spikes fast, it feels wonderful, and it drops you hard, usually right where the writing stops being exciting and starts being work. A Service-Why runs like protein. It's slow to kick in and doesn't feel like much on any given morning, but it's still there in month seven.

Why the sugar runs out where it does

Every reward an Ego-Why promises lives in Circle 3, the circle of things you can't control: whether anyone buys the book, what reviewers say, whether the person from high school ever walks past that table. You can't act on any of those today. So after the first rush, the alarm starts reading the whole project as a bet that may never pay, and the reasons to do anything else start to sound very sensible.

A Service-Why points at something in Circle 1. You can't control whether your reader finds the book. You can control whether the page she needs gets written this morning.

How to tell which one you're running on

Try the sugar-or-protein test. Picture the finished book. Now take away everything it does for you: no launch, no reviews, no one from high school. Nobody even knows you wrote it. Then picture it in the hands of one person who needed it.

Do you still want to write it?

A quick yes means you have protein. A long pause means you're running mostly on sugar. That isn't a reason to quit. It's a reason to go find the protein before week three finds you.

Three moves

Write down the private answer. All of it, including the high school part. It loses some of its pull once it's on paper instead of steering from offstage.

Name your one reader. Sarah, one of the five writers in the book, spent two years writing for a demographic sentence. The book moved once she started writing for Amy: 28, a yellow legal pad, a coffee mug, and nine minutes in her car on a Tuesday. Where does your reader sit when she reads? What is she afraid of? The free Name Your One Reader worksheet walks you through it in fifteen minutes.

Write one paragraph for her. Not the chapter. One paragraph, to her, today.

If the question underneath is whether you deserve to write a book at all, that's the alarm talking, and we take it apart in Should I write a book? →. If your reasons run out halfway through more than just writing, Why your motivation always runs out → covers the same fuel problem off the page.

Worth lives in Circle 1. Nowhere else. The quiz tells you which pattern keeps pulling you out of it.

Or read the opening of a book about five writers learning exactly this: read it free →