Why do we write? _______________________________ Or: what do you get when you cross a sociopath and a cockroach? Some people say that writers write for immortality, so that some part of them can be left behind when they are gone, so that they will never be forgotten. However, that cannot be entirely true for all writers, or else why would Franz Kafka have asked his friend in his will to burn what would become his two most popular novels, The Trial and The Castle , after himself burning nearly all of his own writing during his lifetime? Others say that we write to change the world, to communicate our ideas to one another, and thereby, hopefully, leave them changed. Indeed, none will deny the effect that written works have had on the course of human history. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Dante, Dumas, the great religious texts, and countless other written works have shaped the world we live in and our perception of it in a very real, completely literal way. It wo
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