Let me just say, it is not for the money, because there is none.
Recently I’ve thought a lot about this question for poetry competitions, magazine submissions and my own curiosity. Since Christmas, my best friend Liz and I have been putting together a poetry collection and this has led me to consider why I write in the first place. Rattle magazine, which I really recommend, has the following answer from writer Erik Campbell:
“One afternoon in the summer of 1994 I was driving to work and I heard Garrison Keillor read Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘Tenderness’ on The Writer’s Almanac. After he finished the poem I pulled my car over and sat for some time. I had to. That is why I write poems. I want to make somebody else late for work.”
For myself, I tried to think of a similar anecdote.
Freudian Analysis Of Where It All Began
I came up with the following:
My sixth-class teacher Mr Pyne dedicated half an hour every Friday to creative writing, where each student could write anything original they wanted. Afterwards, two or three chosen kids would read aloud from the top of the classroom what they had written: we heard short stories about a stray alien’s life on earth, social commentaries about the life of a twelve year old, and every now and then, poems. I was too afraid of writing something fictional in case it wasn’t any good. On the very first day he started this exercise, I panicked for a minute or two and then copped out and decided to record what was happening in the room as everyone was writing their pieces. I didn’t think it was in any way useful and I hoped against hope that my teacher would not pick me — but we all know Murphy’s Law. I was called up to the top of the room and started reading: “It’s quiet in the room for the next half hour, which is a nice change from the usual. Kevin’s biting the top of his pen again and Michael’s balancing a sliotar on his hurley under the table.” Suddenly everyone started laughing and I realised they enjoyed it because they could picture exactly what I was describing – they’d seen it before. That was my beginning – creating something new out of words I could share with my peers. That is why I want to write.
But that is not sufficient – it is a good start, but it does not quite encapsulate Why I Write.
Secondary Source So I Look Legit
George Orwell wrote an (awfully more sophisticated) essay on this subject and condensed the general reasons for anyone’s desire to write into the following categories:
1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of prosperity.
4. Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
Kill Your Idols
These do cover most of the bases for why I write but, interestingly, I notice my motives change according to the form I’m writing in.
When I write prose, my motives are divided in three: 40% aesthetic enthusiasm, 40% egoism, 20% historical impulse.
Poetry: 50% aesthetic enthusiasm, 50% egoism.
Plays: 40% political purpose, 30% egoism, 30% historical impulse.
Intentional Fallacy
I have also recently discovered that my pursuits in these forms are all to different ends.
Prose I choose for its breadth of vision and its cinematic qualities – switching between wide views of a scene to close-ups of one character and, my favourite, spending time in their monologue of thoughts. My goal in prose is to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end – never in that order – but, moreover, to explore philosophical and psychological concepts in the context of fictional characters and a flexible fulcrum of plot. The main difference I find between writing plays and writing prose is that prose allows for quick and seamless changes in narrative perspective, chronology and it has a flexibility in expressing the abstract which I shy away from in plays. Then again, my motive in plays is different, as you’ll see below. I idolise the prose of writers such as Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Mansfield & Flannery O’Connor and their power in encapsulating characters in context and how external forces play upon them.
Plays I choose for their flexibility in analysis of character and quota for flamboyance. There is something magical in the gap between script and stage which allows for three interpretations – that of the director, the actor and the audience. The best plays are ones that purposefully do not explain everything (or in the case of ‘Waiting for Godot’, anything) as they are the most adaptable. For me, writing plays is the closest I come to exposing myself in work as they are the closest I can get to how I think and feel about certain aspects of experience.
I’m also a stickler for the Aristotelian ideal of one set, one day, one story. Die-hard conservative on this issue.
My greatest challenge with plays is something that J.M. Synge once wrote: “In a good play, every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.” I associate word-precision with poetry, not plays, and especially in dialogue it’s difficult to get away with writing something like, ‘Mountains lie quiet, resplendent with stars,’ without sounding like a stuffed-up wannabe. Poetry gives more leeway when you want to express ‘lofty’ thoughts, simply because it’s the traditional form for that purpose. In plays, I find that writing a dialogue between two characters which sounds real directly goes against any attempts to be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple – because in real life, we do not choose our words that carefully. I have tried abandoning realism for a more embellished form of speech, but inevitably it echoes something I’ve read rather than something I have ever heard someone say aloud.
I find I am skirting around the edges of my reasons for writing plays. In those of my favourites — ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, ‘The Tempest’, ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ — I notice a common theme of character isolation and catharsis in crisis. This is what captures me most in plays. We cannot access a character’s true thoughts — even if the narrator or the character themselves speak, there’s always room to mistrust what they say. What we’re left with is how they interact with their surroundings and the ways in which the story brings out their personality traits. That, to me, is the fulcrum of a good drama.
Poetry I choose for ideas for which I lack the concrete details that enable a clear explanation of my meaning. I choose poetry for its ability to encapsulate an abstract ideal in tiny, specific details that do not necessarily have to correlate (think Stevie Smith.) Most of all I write a poem when a smell or sensation captures my attention; I notice in the 15 poems I have written for this collection with Liz, I tend to zone in on a specific sense in each – my favourites appear to be as follows:
-carefully chosen colours (pink, black, blue)
-stark images (turlough, violin, graveyard)
-emphatic sounds (‘recumbent’, ‘stalactite’, ‘yarrow’, ‘blast’, ‘circumvent’, ‘suspended’)
-contrast of hard and soft touches (heather/grass, rivers/caves, skyscrapers/warm coat, ruined church/horse hair)
-Certain words and ideas also crop up again and again in these 15 poems: “still” (as adjective, noun and adverb), “tower” (thanks Yeats), stars & constellations, earth/the globe, trees, water, transience of time/distance.
None of this is too shocking to me or anyone who knows me, considering my poetic idols: Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, BJ Ward, Emily Dickinson & WB Yeats.
(Smell & taste feature in my sense-catalogue too, but not quite as much as looking at things, making noises and then touching them. That’s my A-game.)
Outright Self-Aggrandisement
My conclusion to all of this is that Why I Write is, in each instance, prefaced by egoism and it is determined foremost by What I Write. The literary and technical goals might differ slightly, but ultimately, I want someone, somewhere, to read something I’ve written and smile because they can picture what I’m trying to describe. If this is a subject that’s captured your attention as much as mine, please do share. As Alan Bennett put it so succinctly:
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
― The History Boys
