Why I Write
I’ve always had a particular appreciation for movies that have powerful voiceovers, particularly those set to introductory and quasi-abstract scenes of raindrops rolling down fogged up car windows or feathers floating aimlessly just long enough for the narrator to finish framing the plot of the movie so you don’t spend the next twenty minutes wondering why he’s sitting at a bus stop, or how a little girl aged years in only one cut.
It’s not that they’re the most beautiful parts of movies, in fact they’re often just details about a character’s life compiled into a short paragraph, a paragraph that, on paper, wouldn’t read as anything exceptional at all. And yet, these ordinary details set to willowing feathers and crashing waves are the reason that I write.
Writing is like being left alone in an abandoned percussion instrument warehouse where you’re free to see just how cymbals bounce off bass drums and why the triangle is the most versatile tool you’ve got in your box; it’s all about how the words play off each other.
Every voiceover in every movie I both do and do not care to recall has carried with it a certain gravitas, reminding you that what’s being said is important and forcing you to listen. Whenever I write, I write in hopes that I will be able to hear Tom Hanks’ voice in the gaps between my words. I write in the hopes that when my mind stops working and cartoon-quality steam seeps out of my ears as I reread the last two paragraphs I spent ages painstakingly perfecting, I’ll be able to hear my own background music, swelling with the movement of my sentences and to the rhythm of my argument. And most of all I hope that other people hear it too.
Perhaps that means that I just want my readers to take me seriously. It’s possible that the sound behinds the words is just a gimmick I use to take my own writing seriously, and it’s not really something I can hear, or something anyone can hear. But like all good music, and good ogres, the sound of my writing isn’t one dimensional. It has layers.
I write to craft something not just in the meaning of my work, or in the feelings it may conjure up once you start seeing that lonely feather fly, but in the relationship between the words themselves. Writing is like being left alone in an abandoned percussion instrument warehouse where you’re free to see just how cymbals bounce off bass drums and why the triangle is the most versatile tool you’ve got in your box; it’s all about how the words play off each other. I write to find alliterations in words separated by eighteen others between them, or double meanings in mundane phrases that, just for a moment, make them the most interesting things in the world. I write for creation whose only purpose is creation itself, the physical manifestation of which is the release of a slight bit of serotonin, or the goosebumps of delight or occasional awe.
As I write, I prepare myself to more perfectly articulate the things that I think and the manner in which I express them- a skill we all are wont to improve.
As most of my writing is for school, I never know if anyone beyond the occasional professor or proofreading student will read it. I don’t expect anyone to, and so I can’t say that my writing, as a thing, matters to anyone or anything beyond my grades or my education. But my writing as a practice - the act I undertake every time I begin something as normal as a short answer on a test, or something as complicated as a semester’s thesis paper - matters immensely to those around me and to the wider world in which in live. It’s not my writing that matters, it’s that I’m doing it.
When I write, it allows me to calm a storm of shiftings sands of ideas, burning it into glass forever on the page. I consolidate what I believe and I am able to express clearly a few of the things resonating throughout my head, and in that act, I have further prepared myself to be a functioning member of society, and an enlightened citizen. People won’t often read my writing, and if they do, they’re not lending much weight to the caliber of my thoughts, even though they may be lending weight to my words. People will, however, be interacting with me on a daily basis, and as I write, I prepare myself to more perfectly articulate the things that I think and the manner in which I express them- a skill we all are wont to improve.
At first glance, these two ideas seem to be in direct contradiction with one another. How can I write so that people will take the things that I think seriously, while being aware that the things that I think won’t, and often oughtn’t, be taken strictly as fact, if taken at all? To me, they don’t contradict each other: each is simply a reaction to the other.
I write in the style that I do in the hopes that what I write will be paid attention to, granted a certain legitimacy, and therefore validated. But, when the substance of my writing fails to uphold its end of the bargain - when it itself doesn’t deserve to be validated - I not only take refuge in, but also actively enjoy the fact that as long as trees can produce blank sheets of paper and my eyes can see small black letters on a computer screen, I will have as many tries as I’d like to make the things that I write worth reading. It’s not that I wish for the things that I write to be discredited, it’s that should they be discredited, I still gained the experience of writing and refining the thoughts that went into it. I write in the pursuit of those experiences.
In short, I’m no more certain why I write than a marathon-runner is certain why they run. “It feels good,” they say, to which you would reply, “before or after?” a question they would most ambiguously respond with “both” and “neither,” as running 26.219 miles cannot feel good while you’re doing it, and certainly cannot feel good after you’re done, when your knees and ankles seem to be on the cusp of breaking and you feel as though your lungs are at war with your heart. Writing is exactly the same, not in its physical qualities, as the worst toll it takes is a bit of stress and the threat of carpal tunnel syndrome, but in its ambiguity. While immersed in the process of writing, I would tell you that I write because I am creating something, something that is mine, something permanent. With a finished product in my hand I would tell you that I write to share my ideas with you in the hopes that they may become your ideas as well, and that you feel the process by which the piece came to be in the same way that I do. I would tell you that I wrote so that you could hear your favorite actor read my introductory paragraph as dramatically as I had heard it read itself to me.
On the whole, I write so that I have to the opportunity to even try to answer this question. I write so that should I be asked to answer why I write, I will at least have the decency, and the experience, to wonder the same, even if only wondering is really all I can do.