One reason is universal: to share our stories and remember.

For generations, authors have offered their personal musings in answer to the question, why write? Joan Didion, said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Cormac McCarthy, was less precious: “I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.”

As for me, I write to try to understand this vast, surprising, and sometimes heartbreaking world. To enter a moment and hold it, examine it up close. I write to make life feel more real — to make the glowing moments shine brighter and to make the painful moments more bearable.

Read the full post at Medium

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Laura Nicole Diamond is the award-winning author of Shelter Us: a novel, and Dance with Me: a love letter, and editor of the anthology Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood. She is at work on a memoir about becoming a foster mom to a teenage asylum-seeker. Follow her on Medium, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.