My Dear Writing Sangha,
Why do you write?
Just over a year ago, my oldest friend1 Mahea casually mentioned a friend of hers was writing a zine in response to Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Though Christie had no intention of sharing her project outside her circle of friends, I really really really wanted to see how someone else was grappling with issues of attention and loneliness and ethics and the writing life… in zine form, no less.
Plus Christie, like me, had moved from an urban center to a rural small down during the pandemic, and earlier, from a social finance career to under-employment. As a woman of color, a mover/shaker, an instigator, an activist. Of course I wanted to connect! Mahea graciously agreed to introduce us.
A few emails later, a pdf landed in my inbox. Christie told me that although it felt vulnerable to share, she wanted thorough feedback. (“Is it possible to turn it around by the end of the year?”) I reassured her I would treat her work with utmost care.
Then I opened the document and started to read.
There’s nothing I can say here that adequately conveys my experience reading Christie’s work, what it was, or what it felt like. Was this “zine” an excellent memoir? A pandemic essay? A conversation with not only Jenny Odell but also Robin Wall Kimmerer, Eula Biss, Walter Benjamin, and many other writers / thinkers that I know and love, plus many I now want to get to know?
Was I moved? Did I feel seen? Did I want to laugh and yell and do little dances? Was I challenged in some ways? Inspired? In awe? A bit envious that she had accomplished such an amazing feat of writing / artistry / social commentary?
Yes to all of the above, and then some.
The Google Doc I’d opened to track feedback for Christie turned into 17 pages (!!!) of specific praise / personal reflections prompted by her questions / follow-on questions / links to other writings and resources that resonated. I’m a writer; I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. In addition to gushing, there were also a couple typos to point out, a few technical questions about illustrations and general presentation.
I sent the tome of feedback to Christie on December 29th.
And I didn’t hear back.
For weeks.
Then months.
Had I written too much?
I’ll skip a few details to fast-forward to this past Saturday.
Christie’s book2, an interactive show at Mahea’s gallery in Occidental, a whole collection of inclusive events suited to a wide variety of inclinations and neurotypes.
I tapped Christie’s shoulder in the middle of the tightly-packed gallery.
“All of this is because of you3,” she said after a huge hug, both of us suddenly teary-eyed. “If someone I’d never met could understand this project the way you did, I could share it more widely. And now…” She gestured toward the festive throng of people actively engaging with her work, and with each other.
In her speech later, Christie noted how many people have revealed to her their own secret projects. She encouraged us all to get these out into the world. “And I want to help you do it!” she said.
Never in a million years would I have told you that this is why I write.
And yet… it is.
Why do you write?
Why do I write?
Some other answers that feel true right now:
I write to figure out / remember what I feel, what I believe, and what is important to me. I write to stop the words from bouncing around in my brain / keeping me awake at night. I write to let strong emotions be as big as they need to be without causing damage to my relationships.
I write to connect with others who are chewing on similar Big Questions, to collectively celebrate and grieve, to refine my craft, and to spark conversation.
I write after having thrashed through a jungle with a machete to get to some level of understanding about how a thing works, out of hope that sharing what I’ve learned might save others some amount of blood, swear, and/or tears. (My book was a classic example of this.)
I could go on an on about why I write, and I probably will at some point.
For now, I want to get on a soapbox and shout:
If you do not regularly ask yourself why you write — or why you do anything, really — it’s nearly impossible to avoid being swayed by external markers and metrics of “success.”
You may feel like you are failing when you are, in fact, getting closer to your heart’s longings.
Worse, if you don’t know why you want those things you’re supposed to want — as a writer or as any other identity you claim / that claims you — it’s possible you can achieve everything you’re “supposed to” and still feel a gnawing at the back of your heart.
(Let me be clear here: if you are a writer and you do in fact wish to have a book published by one of the big publishers / get an MFA degree / go viral with your social media poetry / etc, Huzzah! May it be so! I fully support your efforts… provided you know why you want to achieve those things, and you feel confident that they will provide what you are after.)
Why do you write?
Many others have written on why they write. Here is a small collection, for inspiration / provocation.
First and foremost: Terry Tempest Williams’ Why I Write, via Sam4. It’s short and it’s beautiful and it’s heart-achingly relatable and your computer may prompt you not to trust the link but it downloads this pdf and you will not regret saving it to read again later.
George Orwell, Why I Write, 1946:
…no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
and
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.
Joan Didion, Why I Write, 2021:
…there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
and
All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Jennifer Perrine5 writes, in her November Practice Makes. newsletter, about two different kinds of writing she believed were quite separate in terms of both process and intention. Yet they’ve led her to the same place:
I’ve been surprised to recognize lately how those journalistic essays have, in fact, performed the same sort of self-inquisitive magic that poems always have, helping me to figure out a truth that I didn’t yet have the words for.
And Lo, as I am writing this, Tusiata Avia’s latest newsletter, also entitled Why I Write, lands in my inbox. She says:
if you’re a writer to write uncompromisingly (whatever that is to you), if you’re any kind of creative - be it cook or dancer or ________________ (fill in the blank - remember living is a creative act) - stay true to your course.
YES <3
Why do YOU write?
with Lovingkindness,
Elizabeth
As in: the friend I’ve had the longest, not the one of most advanced age.
The print paperbacks sold out that night at Neon Raspberry, but you might still be able to get the hardcover version from them?
I graciously received her compliment and I know — I let her know! — that she is the one who made it happen.
Of course Sam, always Sam, I love you Sam <3
Sam shared this with me after Anne Liu Kellor shared it with her.
Because she’s got a new job, Jennifer won’t be teaching much for a while… but her very excellent Decolonizing Nature Writing class is still happening this February! Registration opens December 12th.