Why Writers Write

Every day I wake up, go to my office with a cup of coffee and stand in the doorway horrified by what has appeared in the night – a huge block of granite, taller than a man, big enough to carve the David. Like Michelangelo, that’s the task of the writer. Why writers write is a mystery, even to themselves.

Writing isn’t a job, even a calling. It is an fixation. A sickness. Writers write because they are obstinate, passionate, unreasonable. All writing is vanity. The characters we invent are aspects of ourselves. We set them free and then impose on them our own doubts, fears and paranoia. When you go to bed at night, you lay there with the threads of your story wondering what’s going to happen next. When you do slide into a restless sleep, your characters weave their own plots and make their own choices. The writer creates her characters. She does not imprison them.

Fiction makes our factual lives worth living. You will learn more from a novel than an encyclopaedia. But novels are not self-help books. Novels are a ring of keys that will open many doors. Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question. Between these opposing states there is a puzzle that can be pieced together in many different ways and it is up to the reader to work out the solution that’s right for them.

Writing a novel requires unflinching self-belief and self-doubt. It has been said that there is only a handful of stories, seven, ten, a dozen, it varies. Every love story is Romeo and Juliet. Every quest is Jason and the Golden Fleece. Your great story must be like all the great stories but different. This paradox is the essence and absurdity of writing.

Knowing how to write and knowing how to write is not the same thing. Writing is an art as well as a craft. The craft you learn. The art is in you as music was in Mozart and oil paint ran in the veins of Picasso. Writers blessed with the gift and curse of being writers don’t write for fame or fortune. If it happens it is an unexpected collision between fate and perseverance, preparation meeting providence.

All success comes from obsession and a touch of madness. The madness required to write and keep writing a story that is authentic without clichés, original yet universal. To create a novel that is compelling over the course of many thousands of words, characters that your readers believe in, to write and keep writing without a publisher, an agent, a patron, is an attempt to answer questions that may have no answers, and make sense of a world that makes no sense. That is why writers write.

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