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By Noah Tillery 
I spend a lot of my free time telling stories. Often, they are short and simple, and take place in a made-up world with made-up people facing humanly impossible challenges. Other times they are long and complex, trying their best to tackle issues that are important to me and that I have lived through. I’ve never made a dime from my stories, and probably never will. And that is completely fine with me.
When people learn that I enjoy creative writing, they are always interested, but generally for the wrong reasons. They don’t ask about the stories or characters, or the process of detailing a plot and organizing scenes. The go-to question is something like, “So, are you published? No? Well, when do you want to be published?”
It’s frustrating to have my hobby—one that has played a significant role in my life—equated to a money-making scheme. It’s frustrating, but I understand. If not to make money, why else would someone spend hours in front of a computer screen, pounding away at a keyboard, only to print out their finished work and put it in a desk drawer? I’ve asked myself this same question often, and I thought it would do good to try and answer it.
Most importantly, and the reason I always give when people ask, I write because I enjoy it. Personally, there is nothing more satisfying than having an inkling of an idea—something so simple that unless you were looking for it in your mind it would have come and gone in a heartbeat—having that idea, whether it be a single line of prose, or an exchange of dialogue, or a character profile, and nurturing it as it grows into something nearly unrecognizable. One of the greatest pleasures I’ve experienced is writing that last word, and being able to flip through the pages of a story that you have created, tracing each line and scene back to its original thought, and relishing in how far it, and therefore you, have come since starting.
Beyond the satisfaction of writing, the most obvious reason as to why I write is the creative outlet it offers. It’s relaxing, I think, to sit back for an hour or so a day and leave for a moment whatever stress or worries you have going for you and replace them with your own imagination. Through imaginative prose, it becomes easier to write about real-world problems and concerns. Writers can explore an infinite amount of “what-ifs” and “what-could-have-been’s.” They can dissect social issues without offense or worry of controversy. They can determine their own beliefs through characters who believe the same or completely different ideals, aspirations, and ethic. Ultimately, writers can explore. George R.R. Martin said in his A Dance with Dragons, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. . .the man who never reads lives only one.” That is true, and it’s true ten-fold for a writer.
This blog was short and nothing spectacular, so I hope it can help explain just a little why I enjoy writing, in all of its forms, from the act of doing it to the planning that it calls for. There have been better writers and better minds consider this than myself, and I would suggest anyone to read them so they can understand better the reasons writers write, even when most of us will never make a penny from our work. Writing is a dog’s life, but truly, it’s the only life worth living.
Noah Tillery is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2023. He is studying political science, history, and religious studies at the University of Louisville.