Why I Write

I think to help start the whole blogging thing, I'll explain why I write. This semester I'm taking an independent study with my former sophomore English/creative writing teacher, and basically I'm just going to try to write as much as I can until the end of the year. This was the first piece I started off with.


 

So, here it is.

Question: Why do you write?
“What’s your favorite color?” is a simple question. Easy, concrete. In a matter of seconds, I could give my answer with confidence. I could say that the core of my being revolves around that very color—or maybe I could just say that I like it for no particular reason at all. That one day I woke up, and there it was. My favorite color was sitting at the tip of my tongue and I didn’t think twice about it.

I never had to.

The answer to the question of why I write is not one that comes up simply. It is not the quick answer of a four letter word, or a childhood perspective of what I like to draw pictures with the most. It’s not a matter of what I had for breakfast this morning, or how long it takes me to drive home from work. The question is, to attempt to put it simply (and hopefully as non-melodramatic as I can), unanswerable. Even as I write this, though, to say that a question is unanswerable is to give an answer—so perhaps there is something more.

Writing has been a part of me for as long as I can remember. The first time I noticed what it felt like to critique my own work, I actually apologized to my 5th grade English teacher. After hours of sitting there looking at my paper, I realized that it wasn’t how I wanted that piece to sound. I made red mark after red mark appear on my once-clean page, and suddenly I understood what it meant to make change. Revisions carefully placed and details scrutinized as much as they possibly could be. It was the first time anyone had ever told me I was a good writer. How could I possibly be good when I had to make all these corrections and changes? “It means you’ve edited,” I remember her saying. “It means you’ve grown.”

When I started reading books that weren’t A to Z Mysteries, I discovered that beneath words on a page, there was emotion. I found out that authors were craftsmen of the heart—no longer were books black and white, but colorful and imaginative and something worth thinking twice about. I desperately wanted love, longed for lust and desire, hoped that someone else would think about me before falling asleep. During this time, though, boys my age had not yet met their mental capacity, and for me, I couldn’t find myself falling for any of the ones found in my class. So instead, I wrote. I created stories about girls who were loved wholly and completely. I put to life in a story a world that was nothing like my own, and it was liberating. Something about filling up a page with my ideas and images made me feel less small.

I soon discovered life was filled with story after story. I passed by people in the mall and wondered if the girl with purple highlights had ever lost someone, or if the little boy running along with a toy car would grow up to race. We are surrounded by lives that seem so disconnected, seem apart from our own. The reality is, though, that pages in a book are not bound together without reason, and neither are we. The world of fiction is one that is never ending, and what a beautiful promise that is. Our lives may feel small and insignificant—we live and we die. But stories—stories thrive within the tips of our fingers, in each bell of a laugh, and every time a parent whispers their child to sleep. They are inscribed on dusty walls, streets, pages, and hearts that ache for something more. When someone is loved by a writer, when their story is told, it can never truly die.

Answering the question of why I write is like asking why we feel the way we do when we’re lying underneath thousands of stars. Alive. We are alive. When I write I am breathing, loving, and creating.

I adore lying underneath the stars, and my favorite color is blue.