Why We Write

Between Sara’s post on Marianne Moore and my bit on Wallace Stevens, I’m thinking a lot about what is it that brings us each, as writers, to the page: what is that singular, propelling instinct? Because even amidst writers—even those who may, on the surface, resemble one another in aesthetics or subject—the question of why we do what we do varies so widely, so wildly, that you can Google the words “why we write” and I bet a billion blog posts just like this one pop up.

Chris Huntington wrote on this idea in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers in his article (ahem) “Why We Write,” in which he likens his central reason for writing to a crush—possibly requited, possibly not—he had on a girl in high school:

For most of my twenties, I wrote because I thought about the world the same way I’d thought about Kari.

There is a moment in On the Road when the main character (“so lonely, so sad, so tired”) is sitting on a bus next to a pretty Mexican girl and starts silently beating his thighs with his fist, whispering, “You gotta, you gotta or you’ll die! Damn fool, talk to her!” I read those lines at twenty-two and thought, “That’s how I feel every day, about everything.” It was how I saw the world. Every word I’ve ever written has been a kind of valentine to the world. “Please look at me. Please be mine.”

And his reason deepens, becomes more complicated, from that place of asking for love after he becomes a father, but this is the moment in the article where I found myself at once profoundly moved and somewhat disagreeable, though I didn’t know how to express why. Because while I understand where he’s coming from—there is a sense of that Dickinsonian “This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me” to my own shape-making impulse—that’s not quite the way I feel about it, not exactly.

In that completely predictable way, I’m predisposed to color my life lately with shades of my recent graduation and a trip back to my old college town for my 5-year reunion; things feel at an apex, which I don’t mean in the “highest point” way so much as a culmination: streams gathering into a bigger stream, which will likely meet up with a river somewhere down the line, but it’s impossible to tell where or when. It’s exciting, we say to each other in frenzied, three-page-long emails, and it is. Exciting like an earthquake must be if you’ve never experienced one before. Exciting like petrifying.

Which is why Mary Ruefle’s essay, “On Fear” felt so important when I read it yesterday on my parents’ front porch in South Carolina, where I’ve gone to escape the 110 degree-and-rising temperatures in Arizona. The June issue of Poetry took forever to make its way to me, forwarded from my home address to this, what’s likely to be my last summer vacation. But I like to think it got here when it needed to:

Fear is the greatest motivator of all time. Conflict born of fear is behind our every action, driving us forward like the cogs of a clock. Fear is desire’s dark dress, its doppelgänger. “Love and dread are brothers,” says Julian of Norwich. As desire is wanting and fear is not-wanting, they become inexorably linked; just as desire can be destructive (the desire for power), fear can be constructive (fear of hurting another); fear of poverty becomes desire for wealth.

Oh, this. When I think about Ruefle’s sense of fear and wanting, of that inexorable connection, I think of a bike tire: alternating spokes jutting from a center, the whole thing helping us trundle on from one place to another, necessarily and with purpose. In her post on Marianne Moore, Sara wondered, “Is this why I write poetry? To be in control—to ease fears that I’m not?” No, that’s not the only reason, but the fear is there, as much as it is for Stevens’ speaker in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in his attempt to make sense of the juxtaposition of the ocean’s chaos and the lights of the town, wondering,

…Why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Are we trying to “master the night” out of fear? Is that what writing is? Sure, sometimes, but fear is also a conversation, a desire to participate in, to deepen through that participation, the world around us. Maybe that’s why I write: related to Huntington’s valentine, it’s an urge to be included, to be enveloped, to feel cherished by Creation in the way we cherish it as writers, and to have this interaction with the world add something that wouldn’t have happened without you.

The best fortune cookie I ever received said, “The moment you were born, a problem was solved.” And maybe that’s the clearest way to say what I mean about why I write: yes, it’s arrogant, it’s over-the-top grandiose, it’s presumptive as hell. But there’s something altruistic there, too: a desire to alleviate, to add, to give in the midst of all this passionate taking.

So, friends, I’ll leave you with this question, which I hope you’ll answer in the comments: why do you write? Why DID you write, and what keeps you writing? What’s changed over time? You know, just a little question, no pressure.