Why I Write
I ranted about this paper for quite a while. As it turned out, the rant inspired the main body of the paper. If you'd like to see how it turned out,
Why I Write
The wasteland of central Wyoming spreads out in a grey-green desolation of scrub desert and jumbled rock outcroppings for miles on each side of the highway, too rocky and infertile to support more than a few roaming cows or a handful of scattered antelope. For most travelers, its empty highways are the scene of boredom touched with anxiety: what if the car breaks down here, twenty miles from the nearest town? Yet Wyoming’s broken landscape has inspired some of the most exciting times of my life-thrilling adventures that never occurred outside of my own head.
I started writing stories out of boredom. On long cross-country trips as a child, I ran out of books to read and games to play. When my sisters fell asleep and my parents grew sick of countless rounds of “The Animal Game,” I would lean against the window and stare out at the landscape blurring past. If I squeezed my eyes just right, that bit of cliff was a dragon’s head, and the pine tree at the bottom was a boy standing on the base of the dragon’s neck… I grabbed for some paper. For the next two hundred miles, I was lost in a world of my own invention, one where dragons rule the skies and human mages harness the power of the universe.
Cliché as heck, yes. But the idea seized me and refused to let go. For the next seven years, I spent innumerable hours plotting, writing, revising, world-building, revising again, starting all over again for the seventeenth time… and wondering, occasionally, why I do it. Why do I shut myself up in my room with a notebook (or, later, a computer) and spend hours crafting one paragraph that probably no one will ever read? Why do I spend so much time working out the past of a character who may never make it out of my computer hard-drive? Why do I write?
I firmly believe that every action has a motivation. A character doesn’t suddenly go mad and kill his entire family for no reason at all; an evil witch doesn’t suddenly repent without a very good cause for doing so. So I must have a good reason for writing. George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “Why I Write” that “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feelings of being isolated and undervalued” (2). My childhood was quite different from his; I was the second of five daughters all fairly close in age, with two loving parents who were very involved in their children’s lives. I started telling stories not to amuse myself, but to entertain my younger sisters. And yet I must have felt some dissatisfaction with my life, because many of those early stories featured ordinary children who suddenly embarked on extraordinary adventures with magnificent horses (à la The Black Stallion), mysterious companions (The Hobbit), or marvelous powers (any number of books). I still haven’t quite distanced myself from my characters enough to not envy them their adventures, although I’ve gained enough perspective to realize that I like my life pretty much as it is.
So if it’s not just the longing to act through my characters, what is my motivation for writing? Orwell posits that writers write for four primary reasons: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. I’m fairly sure that the last two reasons only vaguely affect me, because I really don’t intend to change the world with my writing (at the moment), other than by entertaining myself and others. And I’m not trying to “see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity” (Orwell 9), because I’m making things up about an imaginary world populated by imaginary characters. Of course, portraying realistic human interaction does imply a desire to reflect things as they are…but I’m fairly sure that’s not my primary motivation. If it were, I’d be writing awfully boring stories about ordinary college students, instead of fantasy novels about warrior unicorns and enchanted swords.
We thus narrow the motives down to sheer egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm, which I admit are probably my two primary motivators. I must feel that my stories are good and deserve to be written and shared, or else I wouldn’t write them. The thrill I get when someone reads and reviews my stories-even if the review is “constructive criticism” telling me to start over and rewrite from the beginning-is like nothing else. I’m bouncy with “review-high” for days. I confess, I think I’m a pretty good writer, perhaps an excellent one. It’s wonderful to share my stories with others and have them confirm my self-worth. It’s also rather selfish and shamelessly self-absorbed, but as Orwell acknowledges:
It is humbug to pretend that [egoism] is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen-in short, with the whole top crust of humanity…. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money. (6)
I like to think that I’m usually motivated by a strong degree of altruism, but there’s not much altruistic about writing, unless it’s to brighten up your readers’ days. It’s an entirely selfish avocation; a writer’s primary desire is to have her name and work known and loved. On the other hand, since I am perfectly aware of the unlikelihood of ever “striking it big” and having more than a handful of people read and enjoy my books, why do I write?
Orwell cites aesthetic enthusiasm as a writer’s second great motivation, a term he explains as the “perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement” (7). Possibly this force is the strongest factor in my love of writing, because I write many stories that will never see the light of day, and I spend hours on them which I could otherwise devote to more useful things, like cleaning my room or eating dinner. I feel intense pleasure in putting words down on paper (or in typing on the keyboard, but somehow the experience of carefully framing each letter on a fresh sheet of lined paper is simply richer, more evocative). I can labor over a sentence for an hour before going back to rewrite the whole section because I want it to be perfect and beautiful, even if no one but me ever reads it. I try not to write “purple prose”; I find that lean, muscular prose appeals to me more than flowery, turgid stuff. (In reading, I tend to skip over long descriptions of the scenery or the weather or the clothes, even if they’re beautifully written; I’m more interested in the characters and the story). But I still like to polish each sentence until it shines, to sharpen my verbs and enrich my adjective and make each word count.
Yet I’m not sure that this discussion of a writer’s primary motivations has really hit on the essence of what drive me to write. Because I can’t stop. Some days I may have to force myself to work on a particular story, and some days nothing will come, but at other times the flood gates open and the banks can’t hold it back, and the story spills out of my fingertips almost too fast for me to capture it. After months of quiet fermentation in the back of my skull, a story may suddenly spring to life, flowing through my fingers to fill pages of computer text. On my way to French class one frigid morning, the idea and the opening scene for Prince of Dreams burst onto the stage of my mind. I spent the rest of the day blank-eyed and vague, my pen scribbling down story notes and my mind spinning a hundred light-years away. By bedtime that night, Prince Ronan of Auria and the angels of the Four Towers were as real to me as characters I’d known for years, and I had four and a half pages of text to prove it. I simply couldn’t stop. You may as well ask me to stop eating or sleeping as to stop writing.
Sometimes I wonder whether I could stop writing, whether I do have control over the occupation that has consumed so much of my life and shaped so much of my character. I often feel like Robin McKinley, who writes:
I can’t say it often enough that I’m not in control: the story is. There’s some chicken-or-egg about it: am I the way I am because of the stories that come to me to be written, or do the stories come to me to be written because I am the way I am? Both…But the story is still, you should forgive the phrase, the one who has the last word in our relationship. (8)
Like McKinley, I find that there is some element at work beyond the writer’s conscious mind, something that cannot be pinned down or defined but nevertheless is irrefutably there. I may make a conscious, reasonable, and logical decision to re-direct the plot of the story, eliminate a character, or change a name. And yet, despite all my efforts, the story resists; the new plot drags, the character’s absence leaves a gaping hole, the name-change refuses to stick. I may write the character’s name as Hana instead of Kiyame, but I keep thinking of her as Kiyame, and the other characters refer to her as Kiyame, and suddenly all my Authorial Omnipotence has drained out with the bathwater. A story is almost a living thing, as Yann Martel comments in the introduction to Life of Pi, and without that spark of life, you have nothing but words on a page. “An element is missing,” Martel writes, “that spark that brings to life a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right. Your story is emotionally dead, that’s the crux of it” (vii). But in the presence of that element that brings a story to life, the plot becomes real life to me, the characters real people. I can’t help but write about them. Perhaps the story doesn’t drive me so much as it takes the bit between its teeth and runs ahead, little caring if I manage to keep up.
The empty wastelands of Wyoming taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life when I was eleven years old and just embarking on an epic adventure. However barren the world is, however desolate or boring or depressing, there is something beautiful to find. There is a spark of imagination that can ignite a wildfire in my head, branding my memory with images of people and places who never existed a moment ago but whom I can never now forget. Perhaps I write for egoism; perhaps I write for beauty. All I know is that I write because I love it, and that I will never, ever stop.
--Kilerkki
Why I Write
The wasteland of central Wyoming spreads out in a grey-green desolation of scrub desert and jumbled rock outcroppings for miles on each side of the highway, too rocky and infertile to support more than a few roaming cows or a handful of scattered antelope. For most travelers, its empty highways are the scene of boredom touched with anxiety: what if the car breaks down here, twenty miles from the nearest town? Yet Wyoming’s broken landscape has inspired some of the most exciting times of my life-thrilling adventures that never occurred outside of my own head.
I started writing stories out of boredom. On long cross-country trips as a child, I ran out of books to read and games to play. When my sisters fell asleep and my parents grew sick of countless rounds of “The Animal Game,” I would lean against the window and stare out at the landscape blurring past. If I squeezed my eyes just right, that bit of cliff was a dragon’s head, and the pine tree at the bottom was a boy standing on the base of the dragon’s neck… I grabbed for some paper. For the next two hundred miles, I was lost in a world of my own invention, one where dragons rule the skies and human mages harness the power of the universe.
Cliché as heck, yes. But the idea seized me and refused to let go. For the next seven years, I spent innumerable hours plotting, writing, revising, world-building, revising again, starting all over again for the seventeenth time… and wondering, occasionally, why I do it. Why do I shut myself up in my room with a notebook (or, later, a computer) and spend hours crafting one paragraph that probably no one will ever read? Why do I spend so much time working out the past of a character who may never make it out of my computer hard-drive? Why do I write?
I firmly believe that every action has a motivation. A character doesn’t suddenly go mad and kill his entire family for no reason at all; an evil witch doesn’t suddenly repent without a very good cause for doing so. So I must have a good reason for writing. George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “Why I Write” that “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feelings of being isolated and undervalued” (2). My childhood was quite different from his; I was the second of five daughters all fairly close in age, with two loving parents who were very involved in their children’s lives. I started telling stories not to amuse myself, but to entertain my younger sisters. And yet I must have felt some dissatisfaction with my life, because many of those early stories featured ordinary children who suddenly embarked on extraordinary adventures with magnificent horses (à la The Black Stallion), mysterious companions (The Hobbit), or marvelous powers (any number of books). I still haven’t quite distanced myself from my characters enough to not envy them their adventures, although I’ve gained enough perspective to realize that I like my life pretty much as it is.
So if it’s not just the longing to act through my characters, what is my motivation for writing? Orwell posits that writers write for four primary reasons: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. I’m fairly sure that the last two reasons only vaguely affect me, because I really don’t intend to change the world with my writing (at the moment), other than by entertaining myself and others. And I’m not trying to “see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity” (Orwell 9), because I’m making things up about an imaginary world populated by imaginary characters. Of course, portraying realistic human interaction does imply a desire to reflect things as they are…but I’m fairly sure that’s not my primary motivation. If it were, I’d be writing awfully boring stories about ordinary college students, instead of fantasy novels about warrior unicorns and enchanted swords.
We thus narrow the motives down to sheer egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm, which I admit are probably my two primary motivators. I must feel that my stories are good and deserve to be written and shared, or else I wouldn’t write them. The thrill I get when someone reads and reviews my stories-even if the review is “constructive criticism” telling me to start over and rewrite from the beginning-is like nothing else. I’m bouncy with “review-high” for days. I confess, I think I’m a pretty good writer, perhaps an excellent one. It’s wonderful to share my stories with others and have them confirm my self-worth. It’s also rather selfish and shamelessly self-absorbed, but as Orwell acknowledges:
It is humbug to pretend that [egoism] is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen-in short, with the whole top crust of humanity…. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money. (6)
I like to think that I’m usually motivated by a strong degree of altruism, but there’s not much altruistic about writing, unless it’s to brighten up your readers’ days. It’s an entirely selfish avocation; a writer’s primary desire is to have her name and work known and loved. On the other hand, since I am perfectly aware of the unlikelihood of ever “striking it big” and having more than a handful of people read and enjoy my books, why do I write?
Orwell cites aesthetic enthusiasm as a writer’s second great motivation, a term he explains as the “perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement” (7). Possibly this force is the strongest factor in my love of writing, because I write many stories that will never see the light of day, and I spend hours on them which I could otherwise devote to more useful things, like cleaning my room or eating dinner. I feel intense pleasure in putting words down on paper (or in typing on the keyboard, but somehow the experience of carefully framing each letter on a fresh sheet of lined paper is simply richer, more evocative). I can labor over a sentence for an hour before going back to rewrite the whole section because I want it to be perfect and beautiful, even if no one but me ever reads it. I try not to write “purple prose”; I find that lean, muscular prose appeals to me more than flowery, turgid stuff. (In reading, I tend to skip over long descriptions of the scenery or the weather or the clothes, even if they’re beautifully written; I’m more interested in the characters and the story). But I still like to polish each sentence until it shines, to sharpen my verbs and enrich my adjective and make each word count.
Yet I’m not sure that this discussion of a writer’s primary motivations has really hit on the essence of what drive me to write. Because I can’t stop. Some days I may have to force myself to work on a particular story, and some days nothing will come, but at other times the flood gates open and the banks can’t hold it back, and the story spills out of my fingertips almost too fast for me to capture it. After months of quiet fermentation in the back of my skull, a story may suddenly spring to life, flowing through my fingers to fill pages of computer text. On my way to French class one frigid morning, the idea and the opening scene for Prince of Dreams burst onto the stage of my mind. I spent the rest of the day blank-eyed and vague, my pen scribbling down story notes and my mind spinning a hundred light-years away. By bedtime that night, Prince Ronan of Auria and the angels of the Four Towers were as real to me as characters I’d known for years, and I had four and a half pages of text to prove it. I simply couldn’t stop. You may as well ask me to stop eating or sleeping as to stop writing.
Sometimes I wonder whether I could stop writing, whether I do have control over the occupation that has consumed so much of my life and shaped so much of my character. I often feel like Robin McKinley, who writes:
I can’t say it often enough that I’m not in control: the story is. There’s some chicken-or-egg about it: am I the way I am because of the stories that come to me to be written, or do the stories come to me to be written because I am the way I am? Both…But the story is still, you should forgive the phrase, the one who has the last word in our relationship. (8)
Like McKinley, I find that there is some element at work beyond the writer’s conscious mind, something that cannot be pinned down or defined but nevertheless is irrefutably there. I may make a conscious, reasonable, and logical decision to re-direct the plot of the story, eliminate a character, or change a name. And yet, despite all my efforts, the story resists; the new plot drags, the character’s absence leaves a gaping hole, the name-change refuses to stick. I may write the character’s name as Hana instead of Kiyame, but I keep thinking of her as Kiyame, and the other characters refer to her as Kiyame, and suddenly all my Authorial Omnipotence has drained out with the bathwater. A story is almost a living thing, as Yann Martel comments in the introduction to Life of Pi, and without that spark of life, you have nothing but words on a page. “An element is missing,” Martel writes, “that spark that brings to life a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right. Your story is emotionally dead, that’s the crux of it” (vii). But in the presence of that element that brings a story to life, the plot becomes real life to me, the characters real people. I can’t help but write about them. Perhaps the story doesn’t drive me so much as it takes the bit between its teeth and runs ahead, little caring if I manage to keep up.
The empty wastelands of Wyoming taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life when I was eleven years old and just embarking on an epic adventure. However barren the world is, however desolate or boring or depressing, there is something beautiful to find. There is a spark of imagination that can ignite a wildfire in my head, branding my memory with images of people and places who never existed a moment ago but whom I can never now forget. Perhaps I write for egoism; perhaps I write for beauty. All I know is that I write because I love it, and that I will never, ever stop.
--Kilerkki