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As a fellow artist who has crafted her living out of words, I want to tell you a big secret: whether you make your art out of paint, animation, architectural design, words, or anything else, your creative talents and persistence are not only important to the world, but necessary.  Artists take everything, from the everyday to the extraordinary, and render it in a fresh way.  Artists make us turn our heads, open our eyes, and experience a truth or emotion or perspective we'd once known but forgotten, or hadn't known at all.  The way I see it, artists keep us alive.

As you know, I'm a writer.  Like some of you, I came to my passion for my art early in life-in my case, when I was seven.  But the realization that I was a writer didn't come about because I'd actually done any writing; it came in a far sillier way.  I had become weary of adults asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up; I wasn't interested in the standard girl-answers of that time - nurse, teacher, or ballerina.  So one day, while I was taking a nap with my mother-or, really, when she was taking a nap, which meant I had to lie down too so I'd stay quiet-I was on the sofa beside her, looking up at the ceiling, and I noticed the ceiling was full of cracks.  I tried to find some meaning to those cracks, to organize them in some coherent way, and I suddenly realized that when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I could say "a writer."  The connection between cracks in the ceiling and writing might seem obscure, but in retrospect I think I'd intuited that art creates coherence out of the chaos of the universe.  Why did I pick writing rather than painting or interior design?  Got me.  But I did.

In any event, I began writing in earnest, and by the time I got to college, I'd produced four book-length works of fiction.  Then I went into a writer's block.  I didn't have ideas.  I doubted my ability.  Even if I ever became good, I knew better than to expect fame and fortune.  I also knew that art wasn't always appreciated by the world at large.  So why bother making it at all?  Two years after college, after I snapped out of my block, I still didn't have that answer.  But eventually, as the act of writing became completely stitched into my life, the answer-or answers-began to come, until I came to the Seven Reasons Why Artists Must Keep Making Art.

I'll share these seven reasons in my next two blog posts.  And I hope, as you read, that, no matter what kind of art you produce, no matter how obscure the reasons you began, and no matter what obstacles you've encountered, from creative block to market challenges, they inspire you to continue.

Rachel Simon, Building a Home with My Husband, memoir, home renovation, Penguin Books