2 Why Write?
Denny couldn’t quite discern why he was a more-willing writer than the other associates in his office. Part of it, he suspected, was simply his speedier typing skills. Denny could see how some other associates labored painfully over their keyboards. But then again, other associates who instead had fluid typing skills would likewise whimper and whine when finding it unavoidable to tackle a longer writing assignment. Denny, by contrast, didn’t mind taking the longer writing assignments. Indeed, most days, he came in early to work just to write, not for his job but for himself, for publication. Denny couldn’t exactly figure it out, but he knew he had some strange inner compulsion to write.
Writing
Writing is not for everyone. Some, indeed many, have a strong aversion to writing. Recall your grade-school days when the teacher would assign a paper, and students would groan loudly, the longer the paper, the louder the groans. Even adults have aversions to writing. Many lawyers, for instance, moan when a long appellate brief is due. Likewise, many professors nearly perish for almost failing to fulfill their tenure requirements for writing their publications. Fundraisers wrinkle their noses over having to draft yet another long grant request. Physicians rue scripting their daily medical notes, defaulting to voice transcription. Even copywriters and content strategists, who get paid mostly for writing and often by the page or word, bellyache when the weekly or monthly tranche of assignments comes in. Voluntary writers, those who take writing upon themselves without duress or compulsion, generally have good reasons for writing. Knowing your reasons can help make writing rewarding. It can also help you get the writing done.
Employment
Many of us write productively and with satisfaction for employment. Writing is a big part of many jobs, several of which the prior paragraph lists. Having to write for your job doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll like it. We all have parts of our job that we don’t like, whether taking out the trash, cleaning the bathrooms, or unsticking the printer. Yet writing for your job can be a great way to develop your writing skill and interest. If you write a lot for your job, your skill should grow, especially if you write for a critical audience like colleagues, supervisors, editors, panels, journals or other publishers, customers, or clients. You may have begun your job as a middling writer. After years of critical review and commentary, though, or even decades of it, you’ll surely have honed your writing craft. Employment may be how you acquired your taste for writing, when writing indeed seems like an acquired or at least a refined taste. And hey, if someone is willing to pay you to write, then why not enjoy it?
Discovery
Many other writers haven’t had the necessity or privilege of writing for employment. We write anyway, without the demand of a job obligation or promise of pay. Writing can have an allure to it. To write is to discover. The page or screen is blank until you begin to write, when you suddenly discover or uncover things you didn’t know were present and beckoning. Writing can be like getting up in the morning when on vacation in a foreign land, not knowing what your day holds but already being mildly excited about it. Your discoveries may be of ancient things that you researched far afield in order to write, drawn from dusty old volumes that fall sadly apart in your hands, as if to ensure that you understand the treasure that they reveal to you. Or your discoveries may be of sound and logical things that you drew from a rationality that you barely knew you held. Or your discoveries may be of wild things deep within you, clearly from another realm but apparently within your reach if you just found an excuse, like writing, to go looking for them. Don’t underestimate the power of discovery to fuel your writing. Write, if for nothing else, than to discover that which is within and around you.
Community
While writing itself requires a significant degree of concentration and thus of isolation, writing as a vocation or craft is surprisingly communal. Some of us write for its community. That community may include your co-authors or other writers alongside whom you labor, whether nearby in the same offices or somewhere remote, across the country or around the world. Your writing community also includes the editors who, along with their few polite corrections, remind you to proofread your work. Your writing community may also include the managers who share with you the writing assignments while praying that you can finish them all on time to their strict specifications, just before they dump on you an extra rush bunch. The publishers or other clients or customers for whom you write are another big part of your community, ones whom you especially hope to please, insofar as they may be signing your checks or providing you with some other appropriate gratuity. The biggest part of your community, though, is your readers. You may be the only one involved in your writing, but you’ll still have a community with your readers. You’ll know what your readers and others involved in your writing mean to you when you quit writing. You’ll miss your writing community.
Reputation
Writing can also have a surprisingly distinct and encouraging influence on your reputation, enough to urge you to further pursue writing. Once others identify you as a writer, they don’t generally forget. You’ll hear it in families, referring to their gifted one as our writer, as if writing involved some rare recessive gene hidden for generations. The same is true if you’re in a neighborhood, school, church, or workplace setting, where you’ll feel a slight sense of awe when others learn that you have considerably more than the usual modest skill for writing. That slight admiration may alone not be worth increasing your writing labors. But a writer’s reputation can take you much farther in some settings and circles. If, for instance, you’ve ever wanted to teach, either as an adjunct while you ply your day trade or to replace your current full-time vocation, then having published writing or even just strong writing skills may open the teaching door that you need. Published writings are also natural calling cards for leadership opportunities. Your reputation as a writer marks you as a thinker and doer, someone who can reason long and clearly enough to move things along. It may be a small thing to you, but you could value writing for its positive impact on your reputation.
Talent
You may also want and need to write because you have a talent for it. Those who have talent should generally use it. Life passes swiftly. We steward the gifts we receive. You can waste your life scrolling social media if you wish. But a better use of your limited lifetime may be to explore, develop, and generously share your writing gift. What if Shakespeare or Milton had chosen gardening over writing? What if Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had stuck with soldiering rather than turning to writing? The world would have lost incalculably great gifts. You and I are not at all likely to be among the world’s literary giants. But literary giants stand on the shoulders of writing soldiers. Armies advance only with the level of commitment equal to that of each soldier. If you have a writing talent, even a modest one, then don’t sheath that sword. Instead, sharpen it, and march into battle. Join the cause for which your writing talent has equipped and called you. Don’t waste a gift that your creator made and called you to richly exhibit. Your reward may not only be earthly, modest, and temporal but also eternal.
Communication
Some of us simply write out of a need to communicate, without any particular talent. Doing so is certainly alright, even laudatory. Writing isn’t only for the talented. Writing is communication, and at times, we each have important, necessary, or helpful things to communicate. Even some celebrated literary works, among them Don Quixote, The Hobbit, The Great Gatsby, and Catcher in the Rye, are not especially well written, instead here and there tedious, prolix, or even impenetrable. Saying so is not in any way to diminish those wonderful works. Just the opposite: that they more than stand the test of time is testament to their deeper quality than merely the level of their writing craft. You need not have great skill to be a great writer, although welcome and hone any skill that you have. Say what you have to say, and put it in writing. Your gift may not be in the quality of your writing craft but instead in the depth and profundity of your written message. Write out of the deepest part of your soul to which you have learned to listen. That’s the kind of writing that stands time’s test.
Compulsion
One suspects that many writers write with a sense of little more than compulsion. Its source, the writer may not even know. Some writers write simply because they must. Prevent them from writing, and they grow anxious, then surly, then depressed. Writing is a lifeblood for some writers, circulating through them with the same vitalizing force as the genuine red stuff of life. Writing shows those writers that they are alive, thinking, and breathing the words that carry life. As consciousness is essential to one’s sense of self in the world, writing proves one’s consciousness and thus proves one to be alive and aware in the world. Some of us need that sense of continually existing, continually being in touch with the consciousness that is humanity’s hallmark and birthright. Writing isn’t simply chopping wood. Beavers chop wood with too little consciousness to claim a human birthright. Writing isn’t simply doing something. Writing instead proves one’s being, above one’s simply doing, and not merely one’s material and temporal being but one’s divinity and eternity. No wonder that some of us write out of compulsion, to continually claim our existence.
Growth
Another reason to write is to stimulate your psychological and spiritual growth. If you want to be a different person tomorrow than you were yesterday, then write today. How we think of ourselves largely determines who we are and what we become. That is not to say that we each form and hold our own truth. To the contrary, that is instead to say that our unaware thoughts, those things we think lazily as the common consciousness foists them upon us, make us something other than what we could and should be. When we write thoughtfully, we put our ideas on the page or screen before us, where we examine them out of our deeper conscience. Writing lets the hidden self, the one whom the common consciousness does not reach and reshape, arbitrate our dull and common thinking into original and uncommon thought. By placing our meager offerings on the page or screen for examination, we give our authentic self permission to usurp those common offerings in favor of something genuine. Writing enables psychological and spiritual self-examination, spurring growth. The soul lives and breathes through writing, just as the soul should create the persona rather than the persona examine and judge the soul. Write to grow, if for nothing else.
Creativity
Writing is also fundamentally creative, among the purest of outlets for one’s expressive needs. Many of us, perhaps all of us each in our own way, have a constant urge to create things, doubtless yet another spectacular attribute gained from our being the image of our maker. Look at your own life, and you’ll likely see a trail of creative acts, whether making a friendship, marriage, family, home, garden, landscape, or business. You may also have made a smorgasbord of fine meals or booth load of attractive crafts, or filled a gallery of lovely artworks. Creativity of one kind or another likely spills out of you, especially when your health and mood are good. Indeed, pursuing your creativity may largely be what keeps your health and mood good. Writing, as much as anything else, makes something out of nothing. Parchment paper and quill pen are no longer even necessary, if one instead sticks to digital tools and forums. The things that you can create with writing can run the full gamut from the mundane or scandalous to the profound. Write as an ultimate creative act.
Life
Writing is also a peaceful, orderly, structured, and communal way of life. What, after all, is your mental image of a writer? It may well include a secluded library, steaming cup of tea, and cat or dog asleep nearby on the floor. Writing hours can outwardly be the most peaceful hours, even if the writer inwardly wrestles heroically. Of course, a serene life is not the way of all writers. Writers can instead be mean and disruptive. But if so, their wrongs are generally ephemeral ones that others can ignore. Writers don’t wield literal swords. If you don’t appreciate a writer’s sentiments, then close and return the book or switch the screen. Surly writers are fortunately pretty easy to ignore. That grace may be in part why writing can be a good life even for a slightly or grossly wayward soul. A writer can work some things out on the screen or page without turning those things into an unfortunate vice. Writing is generally a decent and congenial way of life. You could do much worse for your family members and friends, and not much better, than to become a writer. Write, then, as a way of life.
Reflection
Why do you write or want to write? What purpose do you see in your writing? What gain does it bring you? Do you write in your employment? If so, does your writing in your employment distinguish you from your workplace colleagues? What discoveries does your writing lead you to make? Do you see, know, and experience more in life because of your writing? Are you any wiser for writing? Has writing elevated your reputation? Has writing opened doors for you to other opportunities? Has writing made you a leader or leading thinker? Do others turn to you for wisdom and insight because of your writing? Do you have a talent for writing that you should be expressing, to properly steward your creative gift? Does writing give you an outlet to say things you feel compelled to share? Do you write without even knowing why? Do you feel down and out when you are not writing? Has your writing helped you grow psychologically and spiritually? Is writing a satisfactory creative and expressive outlet for you? Does writing give your life peace, order, routine, and structure? Are your family members or other close acquaintances glad that you write?
Key Points
Writing isn’t for everyone, but writing is definitely for some of us.
Many of us write productively and with satisfaction for employment.
Others write out of the desire to discover inner and outer things.
Others write for the sense of community that writing can supply.
Writers can benefit in several ways from their writing reputation.
If you have a talent for writing, then you should generally express it.
Write to communicate that deepest message that compels you to do so.
Value writing out of compulsion to prove your conscious being.
Your growth feels inevitable when you write with an honest desire.
Writing is fundamentally creative, an outlet for expressive needs.
Writing is also a peaceful, orderly, structured, communal way of life.