Ryan 3. Why Write?

Why do we write? Is it for the same reasons we read? To escape, to conquer, to create? It’s a big question that I’ve been struggling to answer in just 500 words. Unlike the authors of Willow Pattern fighting for 5000, 500 words in response to existential inquiries is a feat I would rather leave to Borges.

What makes someone want to express themselves and their sense of life; especially in view of such constraints as only 12 hours, with prescribed setting and topoi, in the face of an attentive audience, on just a first draft? An overwhelming proposition for some that recalls nightmares of showing up to class for a presentation in your underwear. Yet there are many others who couldn’t be more eager. Because why not write?

The prospect of having your first draft, a fast one at that, not only published but publicised is not recommended for those with a weak stomach. I have found some old first drafts waiting to be dusted in the bottom of drawers before and I couldn’t stand them, let alone having others read them. From the interviews below we can see that both Nick Earls and Krissy Kneen can relate.

Two weeks ago, on the post Alone Together, Des spoke of her admiration for sharing your work with others even if they aren’t so well written, and the importance of the relationship between the writer and reader. It is this interconnectedness she speaks of that I believe is why we write. Not only to express ourselves and create something eternal and separate from us, but to have it lead a full life of its own by touching others’ lives.

Jean-Paul Sartre (2001, 28) says we produce a work of art in order to reveal something to the readers, but that you cannot be the producer and the receiver. When you write you transmit your history, your philosophy, your love; you cannot receive these back from yourself. In writing you are less conscious of the object than the action. It is for this reason that most writers have such trouble regarding their own work. In reading, one predicts, one waits; without this waiting, without ignorance of the future, there can be no objectivity.

This is why the writer-reader relationship is so important, the writer entrusts the work to another, appealing to their freedom to collaborate and to “lead into objective existence the revelation” undertaken (Sartre 2001, 33). There is, at the heart of the work, a demand for freedom; freedom on the part of the writer in creating a vision of the world as perceived through a window, in which not all is seen but sensed; and an appeal for the freedom of the reader to recover this world, interpret and understand the world.

For the work is never limited by what is written, this is just a guide in the readers’ directed creation. You can’t have one without the other. The act is a generous gift, and the reception of the work is the ultimate gratitude.

500 exactly right there and it’s all thanks to Sartre. Before him I hadn’t realised how much freedom had been a part of my writing but it has always been not only a resolution of mine but an imperative, as well as my worst fear in losing it.

After deliberating on it for so long I would love to hear why it is you write. Is it for the same reasons that you read? Is it for freedom, to connect, to feel essential in your relationship to the world?

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. What is Literature? London: Routledge.