“Why do you write?”

You asked me this three months ago, and I ought to have answered it right away, since it plays so heavily to my ego. But I’ve written so rarely in the last three months, I guess I didn’t have an answer.

I never *didn’t* write. My first short story, which is barely written in a human language, is scrawled in crayon in the Dr Seuss book ‘My Book About Me’. In it, I and my siblings (I have no siblings, which is to say, this was a fiction piece) all fly away from my parents’ house on the broad muscular back of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was, you know, a first draft.

My first software was 'Storybook Weaver’, a piece of edutainment that combined clip art with blank pages. I used it to make “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories. I graduated to Microsoft Works, where once every day I’d hammer out a chapter of my terrific novel, 'Tears of Aphrodite’ (your guess is as good as mine).

A few years later, I’d decided I would write adventure games – playable novels – for a living. I remember my mother telling another woman this, and the woman turned to me and said, “Well, you won’t be able to have children, then!” I remember actually agreeing with her, as if co-signing to an emotional or intellectual fertility meant relinquishing a biological fertility.

In middle school I briefly published a sort of broadsheet. I likely believed that, despite my low social ranking, I could use my great grammar and nerdy vocabulary to produce something other students would feel special about *reading*. Even at that remote time I think I understood that what one consumes – and by extension, what one writes – could be a status symbol. So at that time I was writing for the same reasons a guy might become a musician (“to land chicks”), except in my case I seriously thought I could “land friends.”

In college I learned that the opposite is true: Especially if you’re writing “from life,” writing is a spectacular way to *lose* friends. I think I always knew, too, that writing was a piss-poor way to make money; after college, I discovered it is no way to win any prestige, either.

Two nights ago my grandmother worried aloud, on the phone, that I’d never been taught to handle money; she knew, thanks to my mom, that I’d never managed to quite make my own monthly rent. I explained (in an unconvincing way) that even when I’d had a salary – just once, the only time I’ve ever had a salary, in San Francisco – it was $30k, which put me beneath SF’s poverty line. I explained to my disappointed grandmother that the most I’ve ever been paid for a piece is $250 (by the New York Times), and that most outlets competitively pay $50 per 2000-word article. I admitted to her, on the phone, that there is no good reason to continue writing.

I recently explained all this to Some Guy on Twitter, Some Guy who thought it was “ironic” that a writer at The Atlantic was writing on the subject of poverty. I tapped out a quick response – about how writing does not pay so much, and I used experiential data in my reply – and he told me, if there is no living wage in what I do, I am clearly not good enough, and it is time for me to seek another avenue. I pretended to be offended, but I do think he’s right.

The terrible reality is, at this stage I can’t say why I write at all. I do like to say that “writing can be taught,” and I do believe that, but I especially believe it when I read things from authors who’ve only written for a couple years, and they already intuit things about “writing” I can only hope to understand after several more lifetimes. So that is painful knowledge, when you have always written but, indeed, have very little hope at ever being “the best” or even “good” at it.

I am answering this question at a strange juncture in my life, you know. I am almost 32, I hope to start a family, I live in a city of 15000 people, and it has become impossible for me to imagine a life where games writing, or any writing, is a real possibility anymore. So now I’ve arrived at a stage in my life where, instead of waking up each morning and picturing what I’ll write, I try to picture *not* writing. Instead, I try to think of, literally, anything else I could be capable of doing.

It is not a self-pitying mental exercise; rather, I just try to concentrate on anything else. I’m not sure yet. I think very hard on the real possibiliity that I’ve misspent my life. I’ve always encouraged young writers but, at this point, I worry one of them will find me and shoot me.