Because it's fun and more productive than just watching tv or something, at least it's more thought provoking and challenging. If somehow someday I get a good opportunity, I could always make something more of it.
Because I can't sing or dance, or play instrumints. Running down the street naked and screaming, didn't get any attention at all. These stories in my head have been driving me mad for better than a decade, so I think I'd better write them down.
Some people do it because they love writing and reading. Others because they've watched too much anime/played too many video games but don't have the resources to properly follow those inspirations. So it ranges on a spectrum from a serious pursuit to a harmless leisure activity. As you go from one end of the spectrum to the other, the "point of it" probably decreases, but so does the energy and time that is required, so I think it sorts itself out.
Fell in love with these characters and ideas. Now they haunt me, so I have to write to share their stories.
A friend said: "What else have you got to do?" I can think of many, many things I should be doing, all more useful and unpleasant. Only, I'm not writing now - I'm editing a long and rather difficult novel that's eating up all my time.
Draw a line from point A to point B on a wall. You are born at A and you die at B. You don't know when B will be Slowly walk back from the wall and eventually you won't see the line you drew. That's how insignificant your life is. No more important than a gnat's or an amoeba's or a single-celled bacterium. The great people have statues made of them. One day those statues will disintegrate back into atoms, when the earth, solar system, galaxy, universe all die. Nothing will be remembered. So, back to us and what's the point in writing. Well, there's no point. There's no point in even existing. So I say, whilst I'm here I may as well just do the stuff I like.
This right here. I have a career that I am lucky enough to actually enjoy. Writing, for me, is another form of entertainment, one that I get to control fully and completely.
Those are not so much great people as big ugly men who killed lots of other people. A very, very few are ugly women who commanded men to go kill other men. They're remembered for all the wrongest possible reasons. I'm okay with their statues crumbling to dust or pulled down by uprising peasants. Yeah, that's probably it.