why are you writing?

Anne Lamott tells the tale of her reasons for writing: ideas grow out of a need, as if necessity really were the mother of Invention. We mainly need a sense of belonging, she says, and to know that everything is going to be okay. She writes to give a fellow human being the sense of wholeness, connected to the other characters who feel the same things as that reader and the peace that comes from knowing you're not alone. Not peace only, but a levity of pleasure in the laughter she invokes in a reader is a sort of sacred gift to be exercised to the soul satisfaction of both reader and author.