what i write and why
For years I wrote and wrote, and for years I didn’t think about why I was doing it. If you’d asked me, I’d have said the ‘why’ wasn’t important. (In hindsight, this was probably an avoidance tactic – I didn’t want to pick at scabs. I’d started writing as a kid during some pretty testing experiences; writing had been about inventing better places to be. I didn’t much care to revisit that stuff.) I wrote for years and didn’t try seriously to get published. A couple of agents were moderately interested; it didn’t go anywhere. Then, not long ago, and with nearly fifteen years’-worth of material on which to draw, I decided to give it a proper shot. Well, why not?
It occurred to me that I might be asked about my motivation for writing, so I figured I’d better get over my reluctance to think about it, and work out something to say. Here’s what I wrote, back in 2007.
I is the big achievement of free market economics. It’s very easy to buy into I. Individuality is, of course, a big seller, which is why it’s mass-produced: a mega-industry, with everyone owning a franchise on the retail park where the church once stood. With religious assiduity we cultivate minute differences and wait for word of our uniquity to fill the store – but the other shopkeepers are too busy dressing their own windows. We consider changing our price. Should we stick, or should we twist? Only the weak price low… and my I is valuable. I am worth it. We are experts in selling, but the mall’s cavernous silence seems not to feel so great, right? Some days it feels like we might be alone in here. For comfort, we snap up and shit out increasing numbers of people (some of them real) and wonder who we are. Everyone else knows, apparently. We are dead authors, being written by one another; unheard trees; our avatars live the lives of Riley while we commute in silence, we bleary little cyborgs, swapping airborne pathogens as our i-pods shuffle. The imperative to commodify has long turned on us; we doublethought doublethink into being, and now watch the world falling apart, wondering what we can buy to make it better. I am just yet more I, of course. I’m inside, looking out, my face pressed against the shop window. I don’t think I’m clever enough to write a revolution, so I write about the loneliness in our collective I and the prosaic horrors it must witness, my self bound up in books: page after page of that single, sightless letter.
My reasons for writing are manifold, intermeshed and in a constant state of adjustment. I write as self-harm, as love-making, to remember; I write because I am a thief, a hoarder, a glutton, a slut. I believe in the beauty of order and am hopelessly hooked, as a human, on pattern-recognition and symmetry: I’m a sucker for the printed page. I write because it beats being dead. I write because I’m more than one person, and always have been, just like everybody else. I write because I’m a liar. I write to get at the truth, all the while knowing there’s no such thing. The exhileration of the perfect phrase clutches at my heart like a first love, to a musical swell: that’s something to be taken very, very seriously – it is close to the core of life. I write for victory! I write owing to circumstances beyond my control. It is maybe due to some low-level survival instinct that my reaction to most stimuli is internalisation, aggregation, incubation, and finally representation on the page. I guess I’m writing for my life. I write everyday horror and ugly humour – pain is comedy with the lights turned down. I write the words in between the spaces, but it is the spaces that interest me most. Words are never the thing itself; it is between them, in the omissions, that one finds meaning. I write, ultimately, because there is an I at the controls, and he isn’t done with me yet.
As a first attempt to understand why I’d been doing what I’d been doing those last fifteen years, it seemed like a start. It’s rather overcooked, of course, and I like the first paragraph much better than the second, despite the way it wanders way off-topic. I posted it to my website and thought nothing more of it.
Anyway, recently, fired up by the basis of the piece you’ve just read, someone wrote accusing me of thinking myself superior to ‘mere mortals’. They thought I was saying that the ability to write is a God-given gift, and that I was delusional enough to think some ethereal power had bestowed it upon me.
Oh dear. Well, let’s try and clear that up. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in some silly concept of the writer being superior by dint of writing (or anything else). You occasionally get great people who happen to be writers (or bus conductors, or travel agents, or nuns, or whatever), but I’m not one of them – I’m at least as fallible as the next man.
And I don’t think that the right to write belongs to some elite. I don’t believe in there being any such ‘right’. The sole criterion for being a writer, it seem to me, is whether or not you write. Just talking about writing doesn’t count, nor does writing one thing and then dining out on it forever. Even publication, which marks the start of the professional phase, doesn’t actually make one a writer as much as simply writing does. In my various activities – buzz, buzz – I meet a lot of people who are passionate and serious about their writing, but who aren’t necessarily published. I have myself been in that boat for a good while. It’s a period of great vulnerability, with no timetable and no end-by date. The first question, the one you dread being asked, is ‘are you published?’ Irrespective of anything else – how much you’ve written, whether it’s any good, and so on – this single question is the binary upon which many people will decide whether you are allowed to hold opinions on writing. I was speaking to a soldier recently; he said you can do a tour of duty, be shot at, witness atrocities, suffer all manner of illnesses, but in many people’s minds you’re not a proper soldier until you’ve killed someone. Different fields, but odd validation issues, both. It’s quite a relief to me to be on the safe side of that snare, now. It doesn’t change the way I think about writing, but apparently it legitimises me, somehow. If the concept of ‘the right to write’ exists anywhere, I’m afraid it is in the minds of people who still imagine, in this age of blogs and tweets and short story sharing websites, cheap print-on-demand services and a collapsing publishing industry, that the validity of a writer hinges on print publication – or is a gift from on high.
It’s a rich topic, but I’ll leave it there for now. I’ve got some writing to do.
Tags: what i write and why
