Why write fiction? Short answer: because it SELLS
Perhaps you love to read short stories and novels, but the idea of writing a novel scares you. 60,000 words? 100,000 words? How can you string so many words together so that people not only love your book, but can't wait for the next one?If you can write a blog post of 600 words, you can write a novel of 60,000 words. Just write 600 words a day for three months. Keep it up, and at the end of a year, you'll have several novels selling in Amazon's Kindle bookstore.
And they'll keep selling. Forever. That's the big benefit of fiction… Novels sell, and they keep selling. Jane Austen's been going strong for a couple of centuries now.