Why do I write?

I can answer this question in a few ways. The simplest, and, therefore, perhaps the most accurate, answer that I can give is: I write because I can. I’m not claiming myself to be a vessel of world-beating literary skill – but I can write.

But that’s not why I write. I have the facilities to do a triathlon – thus, I can do one. However, I have never done one. Similarly, I can fly a plane – I never have. These are, it could be said, somewhat false equivalences. Flying planes or running triathlons are things that are built up to; milestones by any other name. Writing is something different. Like most art, writing is something that cannot truly be taught.

Not true totally, of course. You can teach writing – crafting a grammatically perfect sentence is a matter of teachable and learnable knowledge, not some in-born and mysterious “skill”, nor the product of a God-given “gift”. But the writing that is an art, if such a term can be so loosely employed, is not something that can be taught. In my saying and believing this, I know that I come dangerously close to being an elitist, perhaps, or a believer in some sort of divine right to write.

No, what I mean is that for anything to be art it has to say something. Anything that is empty of meaning is not art. A cleverly crafted, snide, sarcastic, obnoxious, or high-and-mighty email that conveys (subtly, more often than not) the message of “Good lord, [receiver], are you brain-dead? Can you not [insert basic skill]?” is, in my considered opinion, art. Something published by a mainstream publishing company designed to cash in on the freshest trend to hit TikTok is not.

Indeed, a good writer should be able to say anything, really, and be able to convince the person reading it that what is written is some divinely ordained truth. Salman Rushdie was a copywriter in London before he published Midnight’s Children, for example. In fact, so was I (but not in London)! Am I equal to Mr. Rushdie? Perhaps not (I’m not). But there’s an undeniable truth that the only good copywriters are those that can say what needs to be said, in the client’s unique voice, without any faffing about, and all of this they must do while being clever, and witty, and all the rest of it. Those who can’t get to the bloody point, or who miss the point entirely, or who don’t really care about the point, don’t last long in this business. It’s the message, then, that matters. And yes, advertising is an art form – never you mind the fact that it’s essentially capitalism’s strongest soldier.

This belief, that the message matters, is upheld also by Ursula le Guin. In an essay (I read this particular essay in the preface/foreword of an edition of The Word for World is Forest) she proposes that the aim of the artist is either: to preach, or to seek liberation.

A good writer must carry out his exercise of writing, I believe, in pursuit of one of these goals (I use the pronoun advisedly, with full knowledge that it is no longer acceptable, but I like the rhythm of the sentence – which, incidentally, I have just broken with this parenthesis. Enjoy. Oh, is that a full-stop in a parenthetical? My, my! Here’s another one.).

So then… why do I write?

Well, I confess, I am a bit of a preacher. It’s hard not to be – nothing in this world is sacred anymore, it seems. Perhaps it never was. Nothing is right, though. Again, perhaps it never was.

But I also seek liberation.

Not from external circumstances, though those are not the best. But from a “rich inner monologue”. My head is noisy, I suppose. Quite the unique attribute for an artist, I know (nb: this is sarcasm). Unlike many artists, though, the struggle for my self-liberation is aided greatly by a staunchly middle-class upbringing, more European trips and grand tours than Queen Victoria, and a foreign education paid for by my parents. Perhaps the validity of my liberation struggle is strengthened by the fact that I spent 5 years broke, hungry, and on less than one meal a day while undergoing this process of education and job-hunting.

Any validity built by that set of circumstances, though, is immediately torn down by the fact that my struggle for self-liberation far outdates my time abroad.

Aha! You might think. I’ve got it! Your train of thought might add on. Then he must want to be liberated from a stifling family, where he had to be the perfect child or follow in his pare- no. I have the most wonderful, supporting, understanding, loving, and good family in the world.

I am, I suppose, my only tormenter. I seek liberation from myself. From the weight of the consequences of my choices. I haven’t done anything wrong, per se. Well, at all. I have lived a morally good life – barring the occasional act of teenage idiocy (but is that a moral failing? I doubt it).

But I expect great things from myself. I always have. For no reason. No one has expected me to expect them of myself, and certainly no one has expected great things of me. But I have. And by my own rubric, which is ever-changing, I have failed my own lofty expectations. That, though, is still not why I write.

That is, I don’t write to fulfil great expectations (copyright) when I write.

I just want to do something worthwhile. Show the world that I existed. That I mattered for more reasons than just my being alive. That I did something that mattered. And then, I am tormented by the reality that the chance that something I write will show the world I existed for generations after I am dead and gone is… only technically non-zero.

But… damnitall!

I will not go quietly into that good night.