Why do I write (Ramblings of a soul tormented by words)

 Foreword

My writing assignment for this week was to scribble together a half-decent justification of why I write - based in part on George Orwell's piece similarly titled. I admittedly had not read the entirety of Orwell's reasoning as to why he writes - and that is partially what has prompted this introduction to my very cliche reason for why I write. It's with an apologetic heart that I reflect on Orwell's words: apologetic, simply, because had I engulfed his wisdom prior to slurring my way to a minimum word count, I would not have been so vague to the extent that I wound up sounding tragically devoid of human emotion. I would have not felt so fearful of baring all to the world as I was had I known that George Orwell was as much a wallflower as I am, that he too felt lonely. He too had visitations from a realm completely different from our own; one where oddballs such as him and I are welcomed, where we escape to when our minds are left to wander. Had I treated myself to the great advice so willingly given, I would have known that though we are separated by years and a barrier into the underworld where all writers inevitably wind up and which I do not intend on crossing any time soon, we shared one key trait: we are writers.

Why we do it is a whole different story to what it is that we actually do. Political and social commentator Joan Didion - who similarly plagiarized Orwell's winning title - defines the writer as "a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of
paper." But it seems a rather pointless thing to do, to be content with living off of crumbs and water while we slave away for hours trying desperately to share the cavernous dungeons of our minds with a world that has heard and seen it all; especially in a world where anyone can string together an arrangement of words, slap it on a blog and call it literature. What is it about writing that appeals to us all, and for the sake of maintaining a sense of relation to the subjectivity of this entire post, what is it about writing that has kept me at it? The answer is simple: because we love it. Somebody has to do it, and life would be extremely bleak if the task were left up to those who didn't breath stories and dream words.

Why do I write?

From as early as I can remember, my head was always full of stories. And for some inexplicable reason, I could always see the characters in the stories my mum told me every night – more to freak me out than anything else, I imagined. I now write, not because I am haunted by schizophrenic pictorial ghosts, nor because I am plagued with a chronic condition which floods my head with words to the extent that I find myself bent double over the loo – regurgitating them like a bulimic in-between meals. I write because it makes sense to me. I write because it allows me to play God, in a sense. I create new worlds – worlds that only I have ever seen. I can fill the towns with moving robotic houses, give my people names that amuse me and throw in heroes and villains as I see fit. I can write adventures I will never go on, slay dragons I will never face, find love – which we all know doesn’t really exist in what we all know as ‘the real world’.

I write to escape the real world: to get lost in forests and swing on vines with talking gorillas, to dive off cliffs and splash into the Niagara Falls unharmed by the cascading waters, and to lead armies into victories against tyrannical emperors who would rather die by the sword than relinquish their power. I write to live. I write history – who is to say that old Cecil Rhodes wasn’t a vampire? I write truths – but who is to say that my truths aren’t your falsities? I write because it confuses me – and it’s through this sense of bewilderment that I find myself. I write because chaos is a lot like energy – it can never be destroyed, but who’s to say it cannot be packaged into hardcopy, given ridiculous titles,  have its pages filled with valiant-sounding names belonging to jocks wielding axes journeying to distant lands for causes that seemingly make sense until we realize that they really do not. We can put chaos in books and call it literature; sciencey people call this transference of energy, or something of the sort.

I write because you read, and so long as you continue reading – I will never be without words. I write because without my words, without my stories, I will cease to exist. I write because I must. I write because I am afraid of fading into obscurity – dying and being no more than another dead person. I write because I believe that immortality is a sentence away – and that I am a well-worded composition of words away from stringing together this perfect sentence that will encrust my name in gold on Zeus’s wall of underachievers who rose against the odds and made history.  In time, my corpse will rot under layers of sand – and your eyesight will fade, leaving you in impenetrable darkness. What I write: my worlds, my heroes and villains, my adventures and imagined journeys through distant barricades throughout space and time; my words – they will live on.