I just finished reading Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Writers on How and Why They Do What They Do. I’d recommend it, mostly because proceeds go to 826 National, a nonprofit dedicated to writing and tutoring centers. I didn’t think the entries were all that compelling. In fact, my favorite part was the introduction by editor Meredith Maran.
Here is some of what she had to say:
Why do writers write? Anyone who’s ever sworn at a blinking cursor has asked herself that question at some point. Or at many, many points.
When the work is going well, and the author is transported, fingers flying under the watchful eye of the muse, she might wonder, as she takes her first sip of the coffee she poured and forgot about hours ago, “How did I get so lucky, that this is what I get to do?”
And then there are the less rapturous writing days or weeks or decades, when the muse is injured on the job and leaves the author sunk to the armpits in quicksand, and every word she types or scribbles is wrong, wrong, wrong, and she cries out to the heavens, “Why am I doing this to myself?”
It’s a curiosity in either case. Why do some people become neurosurgeons, dental hygienists, investment bankers, while others choose an avocation that promises only poverty, rejection, and self-doubt? Why do otherwise rational individuals get up every morning–often very, very early in the morning, before the sun or the family or the day job calls–and willingly enter the cage?
Is it the triumph of seeing one’s words in print? Statistics show this isn’t a reasonable incentive. According to the website Publishing Explained, more than one million manuscripts are currently searching for a U.S. publisher. One percent of these will get the nod.
Nor can we credit the satisfaction of a job well done. As the ever-cheerful Oscar Wilde put it, “Books are never finished. They are merely abandoned.” Only thirty percent of published books turn a profit, so we can rule out material motivation. God knows it can’t be for the boost in self-esteem. To paraphrase Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of actors, “Writers search for rejection. If they don’t get it, they reject themselves.”
Why, then, does anyone write? Unlike performing brain surgery, cleaning teeth, or trading books, anyone can pick up a yellow pad or a laptop or a journal and create a poem or a story or a memoir. And, despite the odds against attaining the desired result, many, many people do. We fill our journals and write our novels and take our writing classes. We read voraciously, marveling at the sentences and characters and plot twists our favorite authors bestow upon us. How do they do it? we ask ourselves. And why?
“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”
So declared George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” in which he listed “four great motives for writing”:
1. Sheer egoism. “To be talked about, to be remembered after death…”
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. “To take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.”
3. Historical impulse. “The desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”
4. Political purposes. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
Thirty years later Joan Didion reprised the question in The New York Times Book Review. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion wrote. “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
In 2001, the preternaturally gentle naturalist Terry Tempest Williams addressed the question in “Why I Write” in Northern Lights magazine. “I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.”
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Why do YOU write?
I nodded along to what Joan Didion and Terry Tempest said. I’m not sure if George Orwell’s four motives capture the real emotional force behind writing. Still, if I had to say which of his motives rang truest with me, it would be “aesthetic enthusiasm”…with a little bit of egoism.
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Next week, I’ll share some of my favorite excerpts from the 20 writers who contributed to the book. Stay tuned!
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