For the past month, I have been in a time of waiting. As an impatient person, waiting is difficult sometimes, and in those times I try to remember the basis of my actions or why I do what I do, which is mainly to write. Of all my hobbies, I have nurtured my writing the most. When I didn't think I could draw or play an instrument well enough, I made up stories in my head to daydream and eventually those daydreams made their way onto paper.

I've also been editing a book which took me a few years to finish, and editing my old awkward writing is beginning to take its toll on my mind. I write this article to further remind myself why, specifically why I write mostly fantasy stories.

1. I write fantasy because it still is relevant.

As our world changes around us in a constantly broiling and bitter flow, fantasy does not lose its appeal. Separated from real-world societal context which creates defensiveness and bias, fantasy can be a reminder of what it is to be individual and to remember that each of us is the center of our own reality. Fantasy is valuable because it teaches, entertains, and reflects on our own lives, sometimes in a satirical way.

Stories like those in the A Song of Ice and Fire series read like history because it is based on history and each of its characters are players in a drama and satire on the struggle for power and the costs of war. Its fantasy elements reflect our world and speak to the creativity of the author. For the span of these pages, we can believe that dragons exist, people can change faces, unknowable gods bring people back from the dead, people of the forest create wights, rebellious hearts withstand the flames, and trees with faces listen to prayers.

There are old gods, new gods which complement our old customs and our new ones, changing ways of showing reverence to the unknown forces that may or may not be at work in our lives. Fantasy causes us to question and think deeply about what we think we know about people. Out of the contexts of our own society, people as individuals can be viewed differently and think differently. When we peel away the context of our own societies, what is left?

2. I write fantasy because other and better writers did it before me.

This seems counter-intuitive, and admittedly I used to doubt myself because there have been better writers before me. Yet, this has become my motivation; they all started with an idea and developed it into something successful. There was a time in my early teen life when I solely read the Inheritance Cycle and Harry Potter.

I read them until well past my bedtime because I enjoyed the escapism. Though I talk about fantasy's relevance, I do think that fantasy can be simply for telling a good story or for escaping the present. There's nothing wrong with enjoying books for that reason, especially when there are so many authors who are so good at writing such stories. The books I read when I was younger inspired me to make my own stories.

Today I still can read a great fantasy book for hours on end, even though I seem to fall asleep sooner now. Last year, I read six books and ten comics by Neil Gaiman and four books by Terry Pratchett. When I first started, I wanted to be like them. It took a while to want to distinguish my own writing style or to be like me.

3. I write fantasy for the joy of telling a story.

When I first began this series I'm still working on, I was fourteen and a freshman in high school. It started with me daydreaming as an intensely introverted child. It then turned into me writing in a thick black notebook every day after school. I drew pictures of the characters, made them character profiles, and imagined up a new world for those people, before writing random pieces of stories.

Then, I shared those pages with a girl I had met on the first day of high school, and that connection fostered a friendship that would last well past those four years. We talked for endless hours about stories I had just made up in my head, and her listening ear made me feel as if those stories were worth the effort.

She has read every scrap of anything I ever wrote for this fantasy series. She let me have the immediate joy of sharing a story without me putting in all the effort to introduce it to someone because she watched it as it developed. Now, I like to think that my stories gave me a best friend to help me write them.

Nearly ten years, a Bachelor's degree, and a few book drafts later, I finally have a story and a series I'm proud of. I struggled for a long time with growing pains of becoming a writer. It isn't exactly the easiest thing to do because writing a book is not nearly as easy or as fun as daydreaming, which is how my writing hobby started.

When I lost my zeal for writing the first draft, it all seemed impossible. After I got used to writing that first draft, editing was another obstacle altogether. After spending five hours in one sitting editing a single chapter of my current draft, I still groan that "writing is hard" and I'm tempted to quit, but I won't. I enjoy stories too much, and there are too many untold stories inside of me to give up now. So even in my waiting, I will be writing.