Telling people you’re a writer is like inviting a neverending stream of questions. I tend to have to explain myself.

What kind of writer are you? Can I read something you wrote? What else do you do?

These are valid questions, especially if you just met someone. But I think that fellow writers will agree with me when I say that it can get old. The problem with telling someone you’re a writer is that you can only do so if you’re totally ready to bare your soul. The best kind of writing makes you feel naked when other people read it, but that doesn’t mean you’re always ready to fork it over.

And what’s the deal with always having to have a second occupation or a backup plan in case writing doesn’t pan out? Pessimistic, much?

There are a few reasons why I started writing for Odyssey. I heard of it while reading a list of things that would look good on my CV (guilty). But once I applied and became a contributor, I realized I had joined a community of people just like me. When I have exciting writer news (read: getting published), they share in my joy.

So I write for Odyssey not just because it’s a great and easily accessible opportunity, but because my voice has a once-a-week spot reserved for as long as I want, alongside fellow students and writers that I know I can reach out to if I’m ever in town.

Sometimes, I write out of a need to immortalize something that happened to me or someone I know. Or to have a voice beyond the spoken word. I write so I can remember exactly how I felt in a given moment.

Weird as it may sound, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I found a strange joy in my high school writing assignments. They were a welcome outlet. In the last year, all of us had to write a memoir.

It was the first time I'd experimented with that kind of writing - before that I didn't know how much I loved it. When the teacher returned my memoir, he left a note saying, "This is a masterpiece. Promise me you'll take at least one writing class in college." I supposed you could say he "started it all."

I'm too modest to outwardly call something I wrote at 16 a masterpiece. But I did go on to take writing classes in college, and it never really stopped after that. Every new assignment challenged me. Of course, university is all about academic writing, but if you really try, there's a tiny bit of room in research essays for creativity (like hiding puns in your footnotes. Again, guilty).

Simply enough, I write because I like writing. It comes naturally. We shouldn’t have to explain our choices beyond that.