Why Do You Write?
Why do writers write? Sometimes, upon analysis, it seems to me that part of it is the need and desire to hang on to the amazing moments of life. Our memories are not perfect and we never want to let go of certain things.
Another factor can be we wish to take an experience, a fear that seems so much bigger than ourselves and make it small words of print marching across flimsy white paper. Somehow, then, we have shrunken our fears down to a size we can manage and thus walk away from. We find the need to walk away from a story that plays in our head, a memory that haunts our heart. If we can commit thoughts to paper, we break the playback loop of the story in our minds. On paper, we give an ending to a circumstance that may never end, to a way of life we feel we cannot always endure. Somehow, in humankind there is a longing for reasons, to tie up what happens into reasonable steps that lead to an end, preferably a end that in some why seems purposeful with some good results, no matter how small.
Perhaps we write because we cannot stand for life to be meaningless after all. We have to believe that we have a purpose, even if just to cause more and more editors to use their time typing our names at the beginnings of rejections letters. We want someone to know our names, if only for a moment.
But sometimes I think we write because we want life to be more vivid that it is. The anticipation and the looking back on an event often eclipse the event itself. Writing is the ultimate mind-trip and a writer can shape the results however he/she wishes, through rewrites making every word perfect until the written experience is much more than it could ever be in real life.
And so we perpetuate the loop of imagination, writing and ultimately often disappointment with the realities life offers. Most writers are readers, raised on the soft cereal of happy endings and scary monsters that die as soon as a book is closed. We hope that life will burst with as much flavor as the first love scene we ever read, that we'll grow up and face a similar chain of adventures as our childhood heroes starred in.
We continue the trend, attempting to scribble so that our readers travel the same way we used to ... perhaps ending up with the same dissatisfaction for real life, which does not tie details into meaning, but throws random surprises and bills and job losses at us as quickly as we can duck (sometimes quicker) with sometimes no more meaning than to show us that perhaps those rejection letters were right, that life is more about money than words and perhaps all these notebooks are only useful as firewood since we were too busy reading to pay the electric bill.
It's foolishness when analyzed and perhaps that's why we rarely do, perhaps that's why we keep spinning our tales and reading until our eyes droop off into sleep, because, crazy or not, we can't give up the ideas and vividness of a human created world, where the author gets to decide just how random things can be and if the hero gets to at least kiss the girl after all.
You can bet that kiss will be unforgettable, both for him and for the reader, as the words jolt our memories back to the moments we can't forget.
Writing makes real life more vivid. Perhaps that is enough.
Another factor can be we wish to take an experience, a fear that seems so much bigger than ourselves and make it small words of print marching across flimsy white paper. Somehow, then, we have shrunken our fears down to a size we can manage and thus walk away from. We find the need to walk away from a story that plays in our head, a memory that haunts our heart. If we can commit thoughts to paper, we break the playback loop of the story in our minds. On paper, we give an ending to a circumstance that may never end, to a way of life we feel we cannot always endure. Somehow, in humankind there is a longing for reasons, to tie up what happens into reasonable steps that lead to an end, preferably a end that in some why seems purposeful with some good results, no matter how small.
Perhaps we write because we cannot stand for life to be meaningless after all. We have to believe that we have a purpose, even if just to cause more and more editors to use their time typing our names at the beginnings of rejections letters. We want someone to know our names, if only for a moment.
But sometimes I think we write because we want life to be more vivid that it is. The anticipation and the looking back on an event often eclipse the event itself. Writing is the ultimate mind-trip and a writer can shape the results however he/she wishes, through rewrites making every word perfect until the written experience is much more than it could ever be in real life.
And so we perpetuate the loop of imagination, writing and ultimately often disappointment with the realities life offers. Most writers are readers, raised on the soft cereal of happy endings and scary monsters that die as soon as a book is closed. We hope that life will burst with as much flavor as the first love scene we ever read, that we'll grow up and face a similar chain of adventures as our childhood heroes starred in.
We continue the trend, attempting to scribble so that our readers travel the same way we used to ... perhaps ending up with the same dissatisfaction for real life, which does not tie details into meaning, but throws random surprises and bills and job losses at us as quickly as we can duck (sometimes quicker) with sometimes no more meaning than to show us that perhaps those rejection letters were right, that life is more about money than words and perhaps all these notebooks are only useful as firewood since we were too busy reading to pay the electric bill.
It's foolishness when analyzed and perhaps that's why we rarely do, perhaps that's why we keep spinning our tales and reading until our eyes droop off into sleep, because, crazy or not, we can't give up the ideas and vividness of a human created world, where the author gets to decide just how random things can be and if the hero gets to at least kiss the girl after all.
You can bet that kiss will be unforgettable, both for him and for the reader, as the words jolt our memories back to the moments we can't forget.
Writing makes real life more vivid. Perhaps that is enough.