Why Do We Write?
Just recently, it feels as though a lot of us have been asking this question. Sometimes, writing is a tough gig. You write a story which you love and send it out into the world only for it to be declined within seventeen minutes and thirty-one seconds. A deadline is fast approaching yet your page remains stubbornly blank. The general public are more interested in YouTube clips about misbehaving pandas than they are about your literary creation. And we’re even having to compete with artificial intelligence and the rise of the machine.
From a personal perspective (CW: wallowing about health! Feel free to skip to the next paragraph 🙃) I’m currently dealing with the worst period of ill health I’ve ever had. My health problem is a chronic issue I’ve been living with for almost six years and mostly when things get worse, it’s about learning to live with the new symptom rather than overcoming it. My new symptom is basically absolute fatigue from my head to my toes, a feeling which is there when I wake up in the morning and is there all the way through to when I go to bed at night. I’ve also had an exacerbation of all my other symptoms. I’m in pain everywhere apart from my right foot and left ear (which are both holding up really well, thanks for asking). I’m struggling with breathlessness. My body is reacting to pretty much every food apart from kale (bleurgh!) Dealing with all those things is tough, but the exhaustion brings with it a drifting fog which makes any sort of cerebral activity much harder than it would be for a fully-functioning human being.
So, why keep writing? Why keep sitting down at the page?
Certainly, I don’t think I’m going to be winning any literary prizes over the next few months. Nor do I think that anything I write is going to be picked up for publication, at least not without a LOT of revision if or when I’m on top of my illness a little more.
But still the page keeps calling.
And if my only objective in writing were publication / awards / readers / respect / nice comments on Twitter then probably it would be pointless to heed that call. But, for me, there are so many other reasons to keep on writing.
Writing for joy
A couple of months ago, I asked my Twitter followers why they wrote and I’m going to share some of their answers in this article:
“Sometimes it’s compulsive. Like a ghost muttering at me relentlessly, until I pay attention. Mostly though, for the same reason I read. I love being lost in a story.”
The idea of getting lost in a story really resonates. As writers, we can tell ourselves the stories that we want to read. We can close our eyes and start to imagine adventures and events that aren’t possible in real life.
There is so much joy in that. While it would be lovely if we could all sign multi-million-pound book deals, for most of us, that isn’t the future which lies in store. For most of us, writing will stay as something which is a passion, a hobby if you want to reduce it to that, rather than something that’s going to become a viable career. And there’s nothing wrong with that. How lucky are we that we’ve found something we’re passionate about?
So, why not allow yourself to sit down and simply write for joy. Don’t think about publication. Don’t think about readers. Don’t think about whether the thing you’re writing makes any sense. Just have fun with putting words on a page. Write what you WANT to write, not what you think you SHOULD be writing. Fan fiction? Go for it! A story with zero stakes / tension, just lovely things happening one after the next? Go for it! A humorous piece about Donald Trump being pooped on by a pigeon? Go for it!
“I write to slip free from the narrow confines of my existence and shimmy unseen into somewhere else - another dimension - to watch and wander.”
Writing for catharsis
Another thing I do a lot of is writing for catharsis and I love this tweet from Jude Potts which sums things up brilliantly:
“The inside of my brain is like an under-stairs cupboard that needs tidying, stories are just tidying the cupboard and offering other people a share of the bags for life and lightbulbs I found while I was in there.”
Writing, like any artform, gives us a fantastic opportunity to explore what’s going on in our life, both past and present. I often write to explore a negative feeling or to help me overcome a particular problem, and I’ve found this a really useful form of therapy.
One thing I often do is a mad-lib exercise from which a piece of writing might spiral out:
[Emotion] is [colour]. [Emotion] is a(n) [animal]. [Emotion] is as [adjective] as a(n) [food item]. [Emotion] is [texture]. [Emotion] is [specific time]. [Emotion] is bigger than a(n) [object] and louder than a(n) [sound]. [Emotion] [movement verb] out of me like a(n) [thing]. [Emotion] knows [knowledge]. [Emotion]…
This purposefully leans into anaphora repetition since that is such a good tool for unlocking emotional resonance and, when you start to write, it might look a bit like this:
[My anger] is [black like a spider]. [My anger] is a [bear backed into a cage]. [My anger] is as [bitter] as a [lemon]. [My anger] is [barbed]. [My anger] is [the apocalypse when all the trees are burning and the rivers are burning too]…
You can keep it going wherever your mind takes you. The key is to explore your feelings and to leave those feelings on the page:
“I write because I have to - to process thoughts, emotions, feelings, moments - I call it a sort of exorcism - to leave feelings on the page and not in me”
Writing to explore
I saw a whole discourse the other day around “write what you know” and how that particular advice risks limiting us as writers. I always suggest flipping the expression on its head. Not “write what you know” but “know what you write.” There’s much more that we don’t know than what we do know, whole worlds of information just waiting to be discovered:
“It’s my way of gossiping with myself, making sense of the world, understanding my soul and others’.”
This, for me, is what makes writers in general such an empathetic, well-rounded bunch. We transplant ourselves into other peoples’ experiences and ask “what must it be like?” “how would they act?” “how would they feel?” Sometimes, I think we demand a lot of ourselves in always setting out to tell a story, but how about picking someone who is vastly different to yourself and simply writing a character study that explores likes and fears and feelings, how the world views this character and how the character views the world?
Or perhaps you use your exploration to research something which interests you? Watched a fascinating wildlife documentary? Pick one of the featured animals and write a fact file. Read or watched something historical? Find out information on lifestyle (homes, clothes, food etc.) from that period and write a description of place.
The only objective here is to learn something new through your writing.
Writing to improve
Anyone who has ever done one of my #WriteBeyondTheLightbulb courses will know I bang on about this quite a lot. In my opinion, there’s merit in sometimes writing simply to hone our craft as writers. What are the things you aren’t so good at? Maybe it’s dialogue. Maybe it’s adding sensory detail. Maybe it’s titles. Maybe it’s endings. Pick one thing and focus only on that. How can you practise that one skill in isolation?
For dialogue, find a dialogue passage from a favourite author and copy it out. Then, start to replace what they’ve done like for like, so if they’ve used a question, change it to a different question of a similar length and rhythm. If they’ve used an action beat, change it to an action beat of your own. This exercise should help attune your writing muscles for the next time you tackle dialogue within an actual story.
For sensory detail, go for a walk and every time you come across a new sensation (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch) try to write down five ways of describing that sensation from the really simple to the much more complex. Come up with similes. Think about how the senses mix together. This should give you a bank of expressions to come back to the next time you sit down at the page.
For titles, read the longlists from a major competition and think about which titles draw you in. Look for patterns. Look for templates. Then think about your favourite book, film or story and come up with five alternative titles using those templates.
For endings, it’s often about image and rhythm. First, write down a whole list of story synopses that just say “this is a story about X” (“this is a story about walking through a storm”, “this is a story about the end of a love affair”, “this is a story about a secret”). Then decide on a powerful end image for each of those stories (“a fallen tree across a path?”, “a ripped-up photograph?”, “everyone’s staring faces?”). Finally, craft those images into rhythmically-pleasing sentences.
Writing for publication
Of course, sometimes, we do write for publication. We see a submission call that reels us in. We get commissioned to write something for a particular anthology or magazine. We write a love letter to the New Yorker hoping that it might get noticed within the slush.
A problem with writing directly for publication is that we hold ourselves open to readers creeping into our minds as we write. We might start second-guessing ourselves, doubting ourselves, changing what works best in a story for what we think the editor / reader is looking to see.
Another problem is that we set ourselves just one binary target. Either the piece achieves publication or it doesn’t – it is either a success or a failure, whereas all the writing we’ve done above is being judged on a scale. Have we enjoyed the process of writing? The answer to that question always falls somewhere between 0 (not at all) and 100 (best experience ever). Similarly, with the question “Was it cathartic?” or “Did I learn something about the world?” or “Did I strengthen my writing craft in some way?”
Coming back to my opening paragraph, we can’t control how a reader will react to our story, and we certainly don’t have a great deal of control over what happens with artificial intelligence. But those other things – “writing for joy”, “writing for catharsis”, “writing to explore” and “writing to improve” are all things we do for ourselves. They are things we can achieve and achieve and achieve without ever having to send our writing to anyone else, even when our bodies and minds have filled with fog.
So, hopefully that’s a reminder for anyone who needs it that there can be multiple answers to the question “why do we write?”
And perhaps you write for another reason entirely? I’d love to hear your own answer to my titular question in the comments below.
Great post, Matt! Terribly sorry to hear about your fatigue. I'm a fellow soldier in the battle, and find that summer, especially when the weather is good and most people are out enjoying it, is when I'm at my worst.
Recently, I too have been pondering this question of why we write. Why, when my body aches and my brain is a slushy bayou, do I get up at the crack of dawn and set my one good hand to the keyboard? One reason is that there are few things I can still do, so I have to keep at what remains to me. That's not reason enough, though. I write for all the reasons you've listed, to emote, to affect, to connect, to explore. Great fiction has moved me, and has sometimes altered me. Sometimes, it has even stunned me. I write because I want to be a good enough writer to have that same effect on a reader. The only way to get there is to keep writing.
Illness and symptoms don’t seem to get in the way of insight after insight, elegantly expressed. I look forward to reading more from this wise literary soul.