“You ask whether I should continue to write if no one but myself would ever see my work. There is no reason to believe that anyone will ever see any more of my work…We are likely to give many incorrect explanations for what we do instinctively. It is very easy for me to say that I write poetry in order to formulate my ideas and to relate myself to the world. That is why I think I write it, though it may not be the right reason. That being so, I think that I should continue to write poetry whether or not anybody ever saw it, and certainly I write lots of it that nobody ever sees. We are all busy thinking things that nobody ever knows about.”-–Wallace Stevens in a letter to editor Ronald Lane Latimer, from Letters of Wallace Stevens
We write because it’s what we do. We don’t write because it’s going to be published or win awards or get a million reviews. We write because we’re writers.