What Makes You Decide to Write Your First Novel?

All through my twenties, i was a waitress. I did all kinds of things, but what i was really doing was writing. And it was i had this big student loan to pay off. It was exhausting always to be just living hand to mouth and struggling financially while trying to write. So graduate school kind of solved that problem for me. But i wasn't finished with it by the end of graduate school, but i was close enough that then i just stuck with it and finished it. Ah, within, you know, about a year after i finished grad school,you wrote this about the experience of writing torch.