In “Why I Continue To Write: Thirty-five years after Last Exit to Brooklyn,” Hubert Selby Jr. says of his youth,

I went into the hospital in 1946, with advanced tuberculosis, and altogether I spent three and a half years in the hospital. By the time I got out I had had 10 ribs removed, one lung collapsed, a piece of the other one removed, and there were some severe complications from an experimental drug that was used to keep me alive. During these years I was given up for dead several times. . . . Anyway, I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn’t be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life. This did not make me a writer, but provided the incentive to discover that I am a writer.

Selby is now remembered as one of the most impactful American authors of the 20^th century. His insatiable desire to accomplish something of significance left a legacy worth remembering. Writing came to define him. As a result, he helped define American culture by painting a sobering picture of the human condition. Here are ten reasons to write regularly.

1. When you write regularly, your mind commits to making work matter. As a result, you’re less afraid to write when it comes to larger challenges. You can easily manage a proposal, school paper, legal report, letter of recommendation, or detailed email asking for a raise.
2. Writing refines your sense of audience and purpose. Many experienced writers will tell you they didn’t have a clearly developed notion of audience until they took the writing process seriously. As a result, they started perceiving relationships and social interactions more perceptively. They could then better define their purpose. Writing is cyclical and reciprocal. We generate a concept, write it down, and recreate meaning from words that talk back to us from the page. All of this hones our ability to understand intention.
3. Writing allows you to chronicle your experience. Revisiting text you generated many years ago reminds you of who you were at the time. The text shows you how you’ve changed, for better or worse, and how you now relate to your current identity.
4. Since writing is introspective, it’s interesting. Regardless of the mode or genre you use, your intelligence, emotion, and style are on display with every word. Your writing is at least a meta-reflection of your identity. At most, it’s a revealing mirror into someone you need to get to know a little better.
5. You can channel your emotions through writing. Doing so is cathartic and comparatively safe. Sometimes, you can even sublimate your baser instincts. You can rage, despair, or stand in awe of the universe in few or many words. In the process, you actualize your greatest passions and purge your inner demons. Articulating your darker thoughts sometimes turns them into something beautiful.
6. Writing allows you to explain concepts that should matter to a suffering world. A fair amount of online and hard-copy communications tend to be crude and poorly reasoned. You can wage war against ignorance by sharing thoughtful reflections that matter to you. Others with similar feelings will appreciate your efforts.
7. Writing enables you to examine multiple perceptions. For instance, visionary science fiction writing becomes science fact when the mind envisions alternative realities not easily perceived by the five senses. Bringing subconscious experience into the light of the conscious world through writing spells innovation and redefinition.
8. Seeing your body of work evolve can be gratifying. Sometimes, you realize that writing guided you from a tedious world of cultural impositions to a powerful realm of self-assertion. Quicksilver thoughts race through your neural pathways, beckoning you to shape your text into a stronger image of the person you are becoming. Your life, like your writing, grows richer with each passing moment, with each click of the keyboard.
9. Writing protects us from the surrounding chaos. How can we even attempt to understand ourselves when we spend so little time making the effort to do so? The world is a banshee wailing for her dead mother. Sometimes, it should be avoided.
10. Writing keeps the computer warm for the cat.