In an essay titled, To Fashion a Text,* Annie Dillard wrote about what writers do, and why. She said we are all put here on earth to care passionately about something; that it’s not more willpower that makes writers go to their little rooms and write:

What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It’s a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning.

What do I care passionately about? Gardening? Yes. Writing? Yes. It is my privilege to live in a place where I may keep a garden and have a room of my own in which I may write. But these and other “passions” of mine are superseded by this one desire: to know Jesus Christ and to make Him known. My prayer is that in the time left of what is allotted to me, this desire to know Jesus will remain my ruling passion.

*Annie Dillard, Inventing the Truth, The Art and Craft of Memoir edited by William Zinsser (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995)