The 21st century is the age of manufactured writers. Writers who learn their craft in creative writing classes, have their early stories workshopped, are polished into lapidary smoothness by agents and literary consultancies before, finally, they become the latest, most desirable brands in a growing marketplace.

I have no quarrel with this; it’s an improvement on previous centuries, when writing—and reading—were the preserve of a select few, who jealously guarded their turf. But when writing becomes a legitimate profession, and writers become high-end cultural products, where’s the fun in it? Because, surely, that’s what makes people want to write in the first place. The fun of taking the basic building blocks of the alphabet and making anything you like, anything at all. The fun of “Once upon a time” and “Long ago and far, far away.” The fun of getting to play make-believe as an adult.

Many of the short stories you’ll read here are not “polished,” many of the voices you’ll find here are raw, not finished. They all shine with the exuberance that rightfully belongs to everyone who finds the courage to take on the blankness of page or screen—the college student writing his first clumsy poem, the Nobel laureate mining her past to write a stunning, illuminating essay, the hesitant mother taking time off from chores to sneak in a few paragraphs that will grow into a short story. Some of the contributors to this anthology make a living from their writing; most have never been published. But what they all bring back is something that we tend to forget about, in the race to judge how good, how big, how important a book is—the fun of writing in the first place.

If you’ve been spending time on the Internet recently, you know already how thin the dividing wall between the “amateur” and the “professional” writer is. There are short stories and poetry that can’t be published because they’re not commercial enough; they find their readers anyway. There’s fan fiction and slash fiction. There’s NaNoWriMo, where everyone has a shot at writing a 50,000-word novel in a month. There are forums where some of the best writing advice you’ll get will come from strangers on three different continents whom you might never meet. There are places like Caferati (www.caferati.com), where the idea of this anthology originated, where you can meet other members offline, or online, and where the only qualification for membership is that you must love writing.

The stories here range across a wide variety of themes. Some are about conflict, some about domestic squabbles; some about the small moments that make relationships work or break down, some about burnings and bombings. What they have in common is just that simple thing, the love of writing for its own sake.

Why do we need a collection like this? For writers, especially those just starting out, it’s about permission. You hear about a short story contest and for perhaps the first, perhaps the umpteenth time, you think: I could do this. And maybe you know this, maybe you don’t, but that’s how every writer, from Miguel de Cervantes to Stephen King, V S Naipaul to Chetan Bhagat, gets started: by giving themselves permission to write one word and then another until they’ve given themselves permission to think, hell, yes, I’m a writer.

And for readers?

It’s about getting back to what the whole business of story telling was supposed to be about in the first place, before the word “writing” was married irrevocably to the word “industry.” Having fun. That’s all, and that’s everything.

Nilanjana S Roy