In response to Gretta's Drive To Write and as part of a series of reminders to myself:
Hooooo boy. This is a tangled place to go, but I think it's probably for the best, because I could use some clarity on the topic myself. And because I feel that Gretta's missing a couple major motivations from her list of possible reasons to write.
Over the course of my life, I've endorsed several different possible reasons to write. Let's go through them in chronological order.
This is the childish wish that started me down this winding road. When I was around twelve I wrote an abysmal Link x Zelda (in their Ocarina of Time incarnations) fan-fiction on the Nintendo Nsider forums, which have since been lost to history. I am happy that this early work doesn't survive, to be frank, because I'm sure I'd cringe at it today.
This is close-ish to "wanting to have written a novel", but it's more childish than that. It's simply the desire to play with toys. Zelda and Link happened to be the characters that caught my imagination, but really what I wanted to do was not dissimilar to making two dolls kiss or fight - I just was writing down my fantasy, instead of play-acting it out like other children might.
This one was stuck into me by David Morell (the author of the book that was adapted into Rambo) at a conference he did in my city when I was around sixteen to eighteen. David Morell had a very particular view of what motivates people to write, and I was too young at the time to question his advice. He was the big grown up writer who Knew The Score.
David Morell said, at that conference, that every writer has a "ferret" - some deep hidden part of them that they hunger to express through their writing, that compels them to write. The idea as I came to understand it was that writing fiction was a form of journaling practice where you put conflicts in your own heart out onto the page in the form of characters and stories, and have them duel with their full hearts until the conflict inside you is won for one side or the other.
This belief that there was something deeper inside me fueling my writing turned out to be true for me; I discovered that I was trans because all my characters kept coming out female and I wanted to live their lives far more than I wanted to live my own. But sticking with this motivation later on led to some unfortunate habits of mine - writing to burnout, and writing vent art that hurt more than it helped.
Basically, the idea that writing should work as "therapy" or "internal conflict resolution" encourages you to dig up your personal trauma and personal conflict and splash it across the page. This can make things compelling, but it's likely to take a toll on you emotionally. It's good if you're trying to make work that means something - and I'm sure many people will want that - but it also can be very painful to go through.
In the end, writing down a fictional version of a conflict in your heart won't resolve it for you - but it can sometimes help to express something if you feel that you've been silent on a topic for far too long. It also won't heal your trauma, or necessarily even help you move on.
Still, I do feel this advice was worth considering, because it encouraged me to involve deeper parts of myself in my work rather than keeping my engagement shallow, and that lead me to my third motivation:
This is really quite simple. As a trans person I'm a member of a minority, and many of us have gone through some pretty terrible stuff. Writing my stories that align with my beliefs and that of my ingroup is like putting a gentle hand on someone else's shoulder and saying "It's okay. It will get better. In fact, here's how it could." Or, for smaller pieces, as simple as saying "I'm here. I'm with you in this."
This is my highfalutin' motivation these days for when I want to be seen as respectable. But really, in my heart, there's two other damn good reasons:
This is pretty self-explanatory. I write erotica. I write erotica because I find the fantasies involved compelling and the process of walking my characters through them is masturbatory (sometimes quite literally.) Work that doesn't compel me in a kinky way often falls by the wayside for me because I don't find myself chasing after this carrot.
This is basically "writing to find out what happens next", of Gretta's article, and here we come around full circle to playing with dolls again. I think in my heart I simply enjoy the process of setting my thoughts to paper, whether that comes with characters or not, and so I write. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
I don't personally believe you're stuck with only the crafts or arts you learned as a child. Yeah, the early period of a new art or craft can be painful because of your inexperience, but so can many other things. The key is to find the thing that is easy to build on and then do more of it. Want to be a writer? Start with roleplay, or questing in the Sufficient Velocity sense. Want to be an artist? Maybe learn to doodle with a game like Gartic Phone or Monster Cards. Everyone has to start somewhere, and the time will pass anyway.