Rowena has written a great post about “Why write?” and has asked for comments and debate. I appreciated the opportunity to read about her relationship with writing and reflect on my own reasons.
My comment: Thank you for the post. I write for several different reasons. I write commentary on environmental issues to help educate and to do my part for the climate and earth. I write personal correspondence to share thoughts and closeness with people who I don’t get to see and talk to in person often enough. I write poetry because there are certain feelings and observations that only seem to be expressed by metaphor. I write my blog to clarify my own thoughts and share them with whomever they attract. For me, there is an element of sharing and service in writing which others prefer to fulfill through speaking or action. Perhaps writing is better for me because of my natural introversion and because I often need time to work out my thoughts, which is easier to do in writing than in speaking.
Hop over to Rowena’s blog and join in the discussion!
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was…
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