It's an obvious question, almost trite (but not quite as obvious or almost-trite as "Where do you get your ideas?")George Orwell wrote because he wanted to expose lies. Orhan Pamuk writes because he has an innate need to do so. Stephen King writes because he believes he was made to write stories and because he loves writing them.
Some people write for another reason, and I tend to encounter it at workshops and conferences: I'm a smart motherfucker. And I'm going to write this book so that you can know what a smart motherfucker I am.
I call it the Jules Winnfield method. Check out the big brain on me!
I used to write that way. I would come up with my Big Clever Idea and spend the whole story trying to hide it, so that I could eventually reveal it to oohs and ahhs and great acclaim. The stuff I wrote that way sucked. A lot.
Kurt Vonnegut's eighth rule for writing fiction directly addresses this:
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.That won't make much sense to you if you think that your fiction project is all about your Big Clever Idea. But, as a reader, I don't care about your Idea, and I don't care about how clever you are. If I'm reading what you've written, I don't even want to know you're there. To be quite honest, I don't care about you at all. Not the slightest bit. If I see you, I may stop reading. If I see you and get the sense that you want to be seen, I will stop reading and throw the book across the room, cursing you for wasting my time with your masturbatory nonsense. (Which is, incidentally, one of the reasons why I blog: there is little chance that you will hurl your computer or laptop across the room to protest my endless self-involvement. That doesn't mean that you'll finish this post, but it does mean that you will get no more satisfaction from shutting me up than whatever you can derive from clicking a mouse button. Petty victory is mine!)
People who write primarily to please themselves tend to write crap. This is not at all the same as being pleased with what you've written. The difference is one of emphasis: if you're pleased with what you've written because you're confident that it will hold the reader's interest and provide him with a satisfying experience, then the odds that you've actually written something decent are much better than if you're pleased with what you've written because there's no chance your reader will discover your Big Clever Idea before you've revealed it in the way that best demonstrates your skill and talent.
There will be objections to this. I hear, "What about mysteries?" Or, "What about science fiction? That's all about clever ideas!" First off, do you tend to remember how the murder happened, or the fact that it was Hercule Poirot who figured it out? Second: yes, there's a lot of science fiction that seems to be centered on ideas, but one of the criticisms that the genre has had to work extremely hard to overcome is that it is all about ideas or gadgets or societies organized in a particularly interesting way, with no attention paid to character development or plotting. The best science fiction is about real people (whether they're human, mechanical, or otherwise) undergoing transformation against a backdrop of intriguing ideas and wonderful gadgetry.
To put it another way: it doesn't matter how smart you are or how brilliant your ideas are if you can't craft a tale that's interesting enough to engage the reader. If your goal is to be interesting as an author, then chances are I'm not going to care about your story, because it won't be about the characters. It'll be about you.
In the same way that there is no atheist more vehement and bitter than a former evangelical, there is no critic of a particular method more earnest than a former practitioner of it. I've got a file drawer full of manuscripts in various stages of completion, all centered around a certain idea that I had, or a world that I created, or a witty conversation I imagined. It took me a long time to figure out that each big idea that I had, every world that I built, and every line of dialogue that I wrote had to serve the story. Not the other way around. It took even longer to figure out how to use that understanding in the course of my work. Every time I came to a dead end, and sat staring dumbly at the screen wondering why I just didn't give a shit anymore, it would eventually dawn on me that I stopped caring because the people in my story were serving me and my fat head rather than the story and the reader.
Telling a good tale requires a certain kind of selflessness. I'm not talking about an Eastern-style state of egoless perception and calm, I'm talking about the removal of your self, as an author, from the purpose of your creation. That purpose is to engage someone else's attention and hold it. Without that interaction, your ideas, even if they are exemplars of genius, won't get communicated.
Opinions on the matter will differ, of course, but this is my little corner of the web so I get to pretend that I am absolutely correct in this matter. Changing my perspective on my work so that the reader is foremost instead of me has resolved all sorts of problems. Why is the narrative stuck? Because I'm forcing it into a direction that will reveal this nifty concept I've got, rather than the direction that will support the unfolding of the story. Why is this character flat and lifeless? Because he's a mouthpiece for my philosophy about this that or the other instead of an individual who's developing in an interesting, tale-worthy way. Why is this project dying on the vine? Because it's based entirely on a world I've created rather than on characters who are undergoing transformations that a reader can relate to.
Sure, some people can go all Emily Dickinson and whatnot. Me, I want to be read while I'm alive. I want to give the reader something for the effort. I want to divert and entertain, to draw someone away from their everyday life and into a place that's worth visiting.
Which means that I don't write for me.
Yep.