Some Non-Exclusive Reasons for Me to Write Novels (a List in Progress)
by Tao Lin
  1. Psychotherapy.
  2. Meditation.
  3. To think about time.
  4. To immerse myself in moments and feelings.
  5. To investigate, use, learn about, and play with language.
  6. To become more mindful of certain things.
  7. For something to do.
  8. As a mental exercise.
  9. To think about the past.
  10. To articulate thoughts, describe feelings, and build ideas.
  11. To organize anything.
  12. To think/feel freely to myself with the help of a second, temporary brain that is the novel.
  13. To stimulate/provoke myself with the help of a second, orbiting object like a moon or binary star.
  14. To think about someone or something for a long time.
  15. To memorialize experiences.
  16. To remember and assimilate what I would otherwise forget, repress, or distance myself from.
  17. To explore, examine, study, scrutinize, correct, create, and alter memories.
  18. To remember long-forgotten things.
  19. To examine and become more mindful and able to change my behavior.
  20. To catalyze changes in my worldview.
  21. To not become too distracted by the world.
  22. To create culture/ideas as a calm, long-term, indirect means to oppose certain culture/ideas instead of directly opposing certain culture/ideas.
  23. To continually remind myself of something.
  24. To become conscious of subconscious/unconscious things.
  25. As an extremely in-depth letter to a few people that equally doubles as a novel.
  26. For money.
  27. For opportunities to meet like-minded people and other people.
  28. For opportunities to travel to other countries.
  29. To spread dozens or hundreds of memes imbedded within a narrative.
  30. To spread a feeling.
  31. To spread complicated ideas.
  32. To create new feelings.
  33. To create a linguistic context I would like to interact with others within in the future.
  34. To create a metaphysical context I would like to interact with others within in the future.
  35. To create a permanent, shareable sub-world I can revisit in the future.
  36. To facilitate change, resist sameness, and incorporate a kind of variety in myself by sectioning off 1-5 year portions of my life as separate characters.
  37. To feel emotions without having to be around or talk to people.
  38. To create new, unique variations of novels that have affected me in certain ways.
  39. To engage in a mental activity that is long-term and can require all of me if I want it to.
  40. To engage in a solitary activity that also has more of a public aspect than anything else I can do maybe.
  41. To mentally travel to places in the imagination no one on earth has probably ever been to before, not even close (novels are a relatively recent invention).
  42. To involve myself in the history of novels and literature.
  43. To create a series of complicated objects that I, and others, can use to think about, feel, discuss, compare, symbolize, and store things.