Why I Write

Orwell is the objective. Didion is the personal. I associate mathematics and science with Orwell. Didion is my writing counterpart. I think my fondness can be explain by her use of peripheral details and how she would be “concentrating …on a flowering pear try outside [her] window and the particular way the petals fell on the floor.” Those type of miniature details are the things I notice in my own mind, but never verbalize for fear of seeming disconnected. Didion has managed to find tangible details and write what she sees.

Joan Didion explains that she writes “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” While I appreciate the harmony in that, I cannot truthfully say I’m that decent. I could write for a hundred years and still not know exactly what I do it, but perhaps, as Orwell establishes, it is not so simple. He concludes that there are four basic reasons for why people write, and that for all writers it is a bit of this reason, and a bit of that. He has it down to a science; he knows.

The breakdown: I write when I can share it, when I can put my name in the right-hand corner, when I can sign it with a flourish. I suppose when held under a microscope, that puts me in Orwell’s first category: sheer egotism. Should I be ashamed of that? Perhaps.

But what about some justification? What if I write because I want to prove my own existence? What if it is because I want a piece of myself to survive when I become dust, to leave behind my ideas and sentences in filled journals? Yes, perhaps it is to prove I exist, a twist on Descartes eternal maxim: I write therefore I think; I think therefore I am.

Then again, how about this? I write because I like to frost stability with pink metaphors and fluffy imagery. I love to sit by and watch as readers sift through the whipped cream, searching for something deeper. Aha, they say, this is wonderful! To them it may be. To me they’re just my words.

I write because I like creating from myself. I like the physical exercise; it’s good for my hand. I like the look of black pens on white paper. I like to get my buzzing thoughts out of my head and trap them on quiet paper. I like to make art with language. I like order and rhythm and pattern and fluency. Isn’t that enough?