From Seems to Fit:

“For this one time,” [Bonnie] said aloud, “I want us each to think about the same question, one question, while we do this. We don’t have to say anything out loud, and we don’t have to spend more than ten minutes doing it, I don’t think—”

George: “Wait! Brandy first, question second.” He raised his glass, uttered a single syllable: “Al.”

“Al,” they all repeated, and downed their shots.

The three men downed their shots, that is. Not Bonnie. She didn’t want the shock of the liquor to bring on a second wave of laughter, and she wanted to ensure she could ask the question straightforwardly and without qualifying or explaining it. Bonnie sipped at hers, and put the glass back down on the table.

“Now,” she said. “Now we touch hands — that’s right, almost like a séance, good. And now we close our eyes, all the way Larry, no peeking. That’s right. This is just us, each of us, answering the question for ourselves.”

“So what’s the question?” said Larry.

“Just this: why?” Bonnie said. “Why am I — each of us — why would I do this thing… put so much at risk? Not what’s in it for Al, either. What’s in it for me. For each of us, inside our own heads, that’s the question for each of us: Why would I do this?” A pause to let it sink in. She closed her own eyes. “Okay? All clear? Go.”

—

Why would I do this? thought Pierce.

The question resisted focus. He could not think of a single argument, a single fact that would convince him to pursue such a strange, reckless course of action…

A recent post on one of Nathan Bransford’s forums asked the question directly, with the title “What Do You Write For?” INTERN asked it, customarily obliquely, in her post of a couple weeks ago (“chain of (publishing) fools”) and in one a couple weeks before that (“exhaustion hunting the great spotted WIP-alump”).

And it often percolates between the lines at Marta’s writing in the water blog, sometimes bubbling to the surface — as in an entry of last week (“This is a sign by the side of the road”). A couple days ago she offered this trailer of an award-winning documentary:

Marta asked:

Would you write if every word stayed in the room with you until you died and left them behind?

Which pretty much lays it out there in stark terms, eh?
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