Why do you write..?
Given that writing can, sometimes, feel difficult, tiring and frustrating it can be helpful to have an answer for that question we tend to ask ourselves in those tough, lonely moments: “Why on earth do I write?”
After putting the question to myself, I came up with the following list of reasons:
Writing feels vocational to me. I regard it as an autotelic activity meaning I don’t need to justify it to anybody else. In the end, it validates who I am and that feels good.
Although I write about what’s important to me, I know my stories speak to others. This is because ‘truth’ in stories is relative not absolute, meaning readers connect with a particular story through their own experiences. Therefore, although writing is largely a solitary pursuit, I know it’s collaborative because of the emotional connections my words can make with readers.
I write to entertain. (Holding this idea in the back of my mind helps me make decisions when faced with hard dramatic choices about the best way to tell a specific part of the story I’m working on.)
I write to create an objective self-awareness about myself; reading what I’ve put on the page allows me enough distance to dissect what I’m imagining and thinking about. Therefore, the act of writing promotes a better understanding about who I am; for example, by seeing my interests, my limitations, and the distance between the ideals I’m tempted to believe about who I am and my actual self. In effect, writing provides a rigorous form of psychological self-regulation, a way to achieving better personal balance, by looking at another version of myself.
I write to prove I can create something new again and again, which reinforces my sense of self, as well as my self-esteem.
Writing is a spontaneous and exciting act for me because, much of the time, I start each day in an imagined world of a story not knowing what will happen or where I’ll end up. Discovering something new every day makes the creative process an exciting and enlivening one. It’s one of the reasons I’m attracted to sitting down daily and writing.
Writing provides a voice for the way I see the world, human beings and the complex relationships between them that my spoken, ‘off the cuff’ voice often can’t capture. So, writing allows me time to deepen my insights and reach for more profound conclusions about the things I observe.
I enjoy the routine that writing brings to daily life.
I don’t understand the process of writing or where my ideas come from, and such unknowns feel magical in the modern world where the desire to explain and understand things can be held in such high regard.
I have no biological children of my own so my stories feel like my legacy in one way.
I write to prove I exist as well as to eke out respect, love and admiration.
There is a quote from Dennis Potter that has always stuck with me:
“…any writer really has a very small field to keep ploughing, and eventually you turn up the coins or the treasure.”
Potter on Potter ed. Graham Fuller (Faber and Faber, 1993)
What I think he meant by this is that we each have our own unique field of experience to keep ploughing for ideas, and sometimes we find something that resonates and forms the basis for a story we can turn into gold. I think it also speaks to the oft-quoted idea that we tell stories to make sense of the world and our experiences of it, creating order out of confusion.
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Reading back through the above it’s interesting to see how much writing is an important part of my identity. Might this be the same for you?
Ask yourself why you write and jot down your reasons. In effect, you’ll be creating a manifesto declaring and validating the importance of writing to you. Such a document might help you negotiate those sticky moments when you start to question whether writing is worth doing at all...