I
just finished an introspective look at why we write and it made me affirm all
of the reasons why I write. Do you know
why you write? To understand and embrace
the answer will make you better at marketing your works.
Mark
Edmundson is a prize-winning scholar, a professor, and the author of Why Read?, Why Teach?, and other books, including the one I just consumed, Why Write? A
master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters.
Some
writers will say that writing comes naturally to them, that it is an art that
just comes out of them. If they didn’t
write, they wouldn’t know what to with this energy and desire to share their
thoughts, experiences, fears, losses, humor, desires, and all aspects of being
human. For them, writing is cathartic,
therapeutic, and deeply tied into their identity. They are what they write. They live to write. Perhaps they only know about themselves from
what they discover within their writings.
But
aside from the psychological drive to write, we write for many reasons. Sometimes it’s for the money. Other times it’s a game, a way for our ego to
be expressed. Many write because they really are coaches or teachers, giving
their wisdom out, page by page. Others
find the act of writing to be like praying, placing themselves into a
meditative state.
Writers
like to learn and discover so they use writing as their reason to conduct
interviews, perform research, and focus their ponderings upon.
There
are writers who use their works to exact revenge – revenge against those who
wronged them or what they believe in.
The pen – or laptop – becomes weaponized in the hands of a writer with
anger in his blood.
Writers
often feel the need to correct the permanent record, to show missing facts, provide
alternate theories, to fill in missing viewpoints. Others recognize their writings help
supplement the shortcomings, imperfections, or impossibilities of life, using
fantasy and dreamy visions to give us not one world, time, and dimension, but
an infinite amount of each.
Or
maybe we write because we are borderline insane.
Or perhaps it’s really a learning disorder or an undiagnosed disability
to be a writer. After all, the writer
usually expresses desires over facts, raises questions when no adequate answers
could appear, and often demands the world be better, different, or nicer than
it could ever be.
Only
in our writings can we experience deep love or amazing sex, be heroes, win
championships, and discover fantastic truths.
Our writings reflect our wishes.
Many
writers pen books in hopes of becoming famous, of being worshipped and
remembered fondly, long after they take their final breath.
Writers
write to work out their shortcomings, from bad childhoods and broken homes to
lousy marriages and disappointing careers.
They may write, inspired by their real-life defeats and frustrations, or
directly about them, providing comfort in tearing apart those they blame for
wrongs and injustices.
But
writing strengthens us – our mind and spirit.
It helps us grow and it comforts us.
It drives us to seek answers and to change the world. We are on a journey to witness, even create,
truth and beauty.
The
writer is mission-driven, acting out of purpose, pleasure, and
principle. He or she will write because
there’s a reward in the craft, because writing is a doing and it’s a fulfilling
act that comes to us naturally.
Writing, for many of us, is our destiny and few things in few instances
can drag us away from practicing it.
Why
do you write? You answer it each and
every time you write.
Here are some
excerpts from Why Write?
To Find Beauty and
Truth
But one might say to
start that writing’s ultimate goal should be to do something for others as well
as for oneself. Writing is about enlarging the mind, the expansion of
consciousness. We’re told that writing
is about finding the truth and infusing it with some beauty, too. But what does that mean?
To Change the
World
Should you try to
change the world – or some small corner of it – with your writing? Ultimately every young writer must decide if
she will make the attempt. Writers
achieve gains for themselves, or they try.
As we’ve said, they can develop their minds and expand their spirits,
and they can fail in the most satisfying and profitable ways. But what about the writer and the world
outside her head and heart? Can writers
change the world? Should they even try?
To Get Even
Writing for revenge
may not be as dangerous as writing for money or fame or love. It can get you moving in the morning give you
a jolt. But in the end the purer and
more detached spirit, the spirit of a Tolstoy, who writes to elevate mankind,
is the one most likely to prevail…
How does the writer
get even? A thousand different
ways! The most common way, perhaps, is
through fiction. He relives his family
life in his imagination and he gets the chance to call it as he sees it. All of the culprits are there: feckless mother, monster father, the siblings
who crushed the tender author’s tender sensibility – or tried. (Freud tells us that when we dream of
flourishing insects we are probably dreaming of brothers and sisters.) They are all disguised thinly enough…
Socrates knew that
money and the truth did not sort well with each other. He took no cash for his
teachings and castigated his enemies, the Sophists, for their money
hunger. Socrates knew the score – the
writer in search of hard truths cannot expect money – or much love either. (For that he should join a rock band) No accident that the people of Athens rose up
and condemned Socrates to death for disturbing their mental peace.
Why Bother?
Writing is
backbreaking, mind-breaking work. So,
one might readily ask: Why bother?
Lonely
Why write when the
work is as lonely as it is? … Writers spend a great deal of their time alone
and are in a certain sense always alone.
Go Writing!
Because writing is
one of the best acts a human being can turn his hand to. With all of these objections on file, and
more besides, the case of writing remains overwhelming. Writing is a great human good, even a higher
good than most of its best-known and most articulate advocates have told us.
The Sacrifices Of A
Writer
And the writer? Surely the writer would like to live. But from the time he throws himself into the
game of making worlds with words, his actual life can become a secondary piece
of business. At best, what others call
his actual life is the sap that feeds the flower (if it is a flower) of his
mind. He stops living and he begins observing.
All that he sees exists first to stock his mind with images and metaphors and
tales.
We Discover As We
Write
We want to have our
say, let the world know our truth. But
first of course we want to know it ourselves.
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