Why do so many people want to write a book?

Why is writing a book a dream so many people seem to have? What is behind the reported statistic that 85% of people long to write a book (but only a small percentage will actually publish commercially)? What is it that draws people to fill up creative writing classes, listen to teleseminars and webinars on how to write a book, attend writing workshops, and buy books on the art and craft of writing?

In the non-fiction world, some would say that they want the book to help them build their business--the "book as business card" philosophy. Or they want the book to establish their expertise in a field. Fair enough--if you're an expert and you believe the world can benefit from your expertise, then by all means write a book. Or they want to use the book to get speaking gigs, or the other way around--to use the speaking gigs as the basis for a book. Again that's OK, and can work well if the speaker/author actually has something to say.

When it comes to fiction or poetry, the book as business builder is seldom the motivation. Instead it's the desire to explore our creativity and to tell the story we feel is inside us waiting to get out. Some dream of cracking into the mass market fiction bestseller market similar to Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer. Others want to write a literary masterpiece that will be a critical success and taken seriously by the world's literati.

But whether fiction or non-fiction, are these the REAL reasons so many people want to write a book? As an editor, writer, and teacher of creative writing, working with so many different kinds of authors over the years, I have detected another reason often lurking below the conscious threshold. It's an almost archetypal yearning for leaving some kind of creative legacy of one's life. It has to do with what the great developmental psychologist Erick Erickson called generativity--the desire to pass on something of value to the next generation.

Erickson originally meant generativity to apply to bearing children and then our children having children so that we become grandparents, etc. But there can also be symbolic generativity, and this is the idea of the life legacy. When words come out of your head, your heart, and your soul and end up in print, there is a sense of something permanent and concrete, something that has your name on it, something that people who never knew you will pick up, read, and say, "ah yes, I find value in that idea", or "I love this story, I couldn't put this book down."

With so much going on in the world today that makes us feel powerless, with all the political and financial shenanigans taking place on the world stage, and hundreds of thousands of people dealing with employment issues, the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, the fallout of Wall Street's greed, the preoccupation with celebrity along with the struggle to make ends meet--it's difficult for many to feel any kind of "generativity". But turning to our stories, turning to the memories, knowledge, expertise, intuitions and characters that present themselves in our heads as potential words in a book--there's a form of generativity we CAN access! Someone somewhere will read our words, and by our printed words we will be known. The true love of writing books is ultimately not about market at all; it's really about meaning.