This in a toughie. It’s not even deceptively simple. It’s not simple at all.
Why are you a writer? Do you know? Are you sure?
There may be reasons that you WANT to be a writer, but what really makes you a writer?
It may take you more than one sentence to get down the why of your writing. You might have to pound out a whole book to know why.
Or you might be able to simply jot down that one sentence.
Here’s mine:
I write because it is the only way that I know to make sense of everything.
There’s much more to say about my writing, but that’s the core of it. I can’t really understand something unless I’ve written it out, wrestled with the ideas, and made my thoughts as clear as possible. It’s my way of making art. And I make art to understand and tell the stories that make sense of the world I see.
What’s your sentence?
For today’s assignment, write a single sentence explaining why you’re a writer. You may need to write a full essay, fill up pages of reasons, but your ultimate goal is to boil it all down to a single sentence.
It’s perfectly OK if you don’t know why yet. Your sentence about why from ten years ago might be different from your sentence today. The one sentence in years to come might be completely different again.
None of that matters for this assignment. Your task today is to write a single sentence that explains why you need or want to write today, now. If, when complete, you read your sentence and say to yourself, “That’s not it. Not all of it.” then you’ll need to continue exploring.
You may not be satisfied with the results of this assignment. That’s actually a good sign. Write about that, too.
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Randy MurrayWriting Assignment: Write A Single Sentence Explaining Why You’re A Writer by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
