A short thought from a simple ink blooded fellow

I have been asked this question many times over, and I simply wanted to share my thoughts and ask you all yours.

Why do we write? Why do we take the long hours of hard, arborous labor to provide a few moments of simple thought or euphoric fantasy? Why do we string together such long chains of words and letters, nothing more than complex, manmade sounds and pictographs, to share the lucid (and often slightly drunk and sleep deprived) thoughts of insomniacs and socially awkward members of society? ‘Why do you write?’ is a questions I am sure we have all heard, and at one point or another, we have all given the same answer…

 

“Because I have too.”

                And this response is in no way to be taken as an offence or a callous approach to simply wound the curious fellows who ask, it is simply the more honest answer that can possibly be presented but such  selfish and pitiful creatures as ourselves.

                We write for we cannot do anything else when our minds become restless. We write for it is our only release of emotion, our only release, our only means to express those unexpressed, or inexpressible, emotions that all others seem able to express or bottle up.  We write, not for others, but for ourselves. We write to please ourselves, much like how some eat, play sports, or make love on the beach.

                We can’t express the simplest feelings with anything but complex metaphors, and we get upset when our complex metaphors cannot represent our rather dull feelings that we feel are uniquely ours.

                Novelists write of the grand adventures we dream of as small children and the horrors of our realizations that those adventures can never occur, but why do we write them? Because reality is what you accept it is. You can slay a dragon or save a civilization. You can guide a fellowship or destroy an entire world of dust mite people in simple seconds. That is why we write.

                Poets write to possibly find a way to describe an emotion. A color. A taste or smell. A world painted so vividly and full of miracles and tragedies. We are the chroniclers of the world, tasked with capturing its beauties and horrors in words as vividly as we can. From the greatest wars to the most minimal and common gust of wind, we translate that which cannot be.

                Playwrights are the historians, a jack of both trades, but master of neither, the gray sheep in a crowd of black and ivory. They speak with silver tongues and write with golden nibs, the high misadventures of the novelist with the lucidity and insight of the poet. They reenact the most important, or simply the more entertaining, parts of history and literature, and translate those god awful allusions and allegories for non-laureates.

                Why do we write? Such a hard question to answer. We write simply because we feel the overbearing need to write. Simply because we need the release. We need to know the end of the story or the meaning behind the gentle crash of waves as they break on the rocky coasts of the emerald isle or the white sands of the particularly swashbuckling seas. Why do we write? Well…

 

“Because we have too. “ 

Author's Note

Why do you write? What got you to write?

Reviews

[TLK]

We write because that's how educated brains think, in words, and brains are also self-regarding in terms of survival, so we think that others will want to hear our words, but of course we are rarely disposed to hearing the words of others, and we fail to notice the fallaciousness of our own cognitions.

Also, it's "because we have to", with one 'o'.