Why do you write?

Writing began as a simple way to create the stories I wanted to read. There was never enough of the adventure I wanted, there were never characters who looked and acted and felt like I did. Writing, therefore, was a very self serving device. As the author, the poet, the creator, I was in total control of my medium, my characters, my environment. It was a purely selfish pursuit that became an all consuming obsession.

It is a maddening, intoxicating jumble of verbs and adjectives, of nouns and allegory. To write is to become something outside yourself, to find something a nugget of an idea and make it more. As an author or a poet you have seen something, learned something, witnessed something that is tearing at your soul. There is only one way for an author to express those vibrant emotions and that is to write them down. To listen to the characters clamoring in your mind about the unjustness of slavery or apartheid, or of the mundane everyday existences from which they desperately want to break free.

You come staggering down off of a binge of writing like an alcoholic off a three day drunk. You're drained and tired, achy and a might bit confused, but in the back of your brain you can't wait to do it again. There is also a smattering of pride and a dollop of conceit within the heart of every writer. You've read the book that YOU know you could write better, you've seen the interview with the snobbish and egalitarian author of the profound, but horribly confusing "Great" novel and thought "how ludicrous were it me upon that programme I'd act MUCH better".

I snort to myself because all of these things are me, we talk about the art, we talk about the purity, but deep within ourselves we all want to be Stephen King or JK Rowling. We hunger for commercial success to validate those feelings within ourselves that push us to write, that tell us what we have to say the rest of the world wants to hear. Not that most of the writers I know, including myself, are confident of that fact. We are forever rewriting, editing, fiddling. Nothing is ever quite good enough, never quite done.

After reading a particularly good book, I am always invigorated to go forth and write. Unless of course the author whom I have just read makes me feel as if the effort is inadequate. There are few other authors who blow me away with opening lines like Alfred Bester. He was a master of the Science Fiction novel beyond compare. Even his short stories zing with life and wit. I am in awe and in those moments after I read or re-read The Demolished Man or Ender's Game or Jane Eyrethat awe so easily plunges to despair. How does one compete with Bester and Tolkien, with Tolstoy and Card, the Bronte sisters? Because, deep in my id it is my vainglorious belief that I belong in their company.

Writing, in my humble yet biased opinion, is the truest art form. Writers take off their skins and bleed from their very hearts onto the page to create such characters as Anna Karina and Ender Wiggan. With the exception of most visual arts, most other forms of art are an expression of something that some one has written. Actors give life to written characters, musicians give sound to written music. It is the essence of man that is displayed upon the page, the raw power of emotion that is conveyed in ways that are impossible to express otherwise.

Words are agressive and beautiful, terrifying and suggestive. I write because it is the most defining character of who I am, it is the easiest way by which I may express myself. Writing is a catharsis, it is the medium in which I find my soul.