Why We Write

To write, to put one’s thoughts on paper and place them before an audience, is, in my opinion, a small act of courage. While spoken words can be swallowed and eaten up, eclipsed by a quick clarification or a huffed laugh, there is a permanency to the written word; a solidity that invites scrutiny. Just as a person’s eyes provide a window into their soul, so too does an author’s prose – how they use dashes or semicolons, what imagery they invoke, what antecedents they recall. While one may avert their gaze or hide it beneath a smartly placed boater hat, however, a writer has little defence against the discerning reader. Yet, the urge to put something and anything on the page is an enduring hallmark of humanity, even in an era when privacy is increasingly coveted. So, to usher in this new year, and hopefully inspire a few readers to take up a pen (or keyboard), I asked our editors to untangle what they think drives this compulsion. To explain why we write.

– Mia

Atlanta:

We write to convey our ideas and questions, our passions and proclivities, our aspirations and our fears, we write, as Toni Morrison would say, “to familiarise the strange and mystify the familiar.” We write to create vignettes of moments in space and time – the (apparently) tiny ones like Proust’s Madeleine, massive ones too, the heaviness of heart and smells carrying in the breeze in times of global disaster. We write to immortalise these moments, protect them from the inexorable ravaging of time and space as the present dissolves into history. We write to enliven something we know and we write to subvert that very thing, twist it round and smudge our perfectly painted portraits of ‘understanding.’ We write to give a voice to the silent and silenced, the waterways and the rainforests, the tigers that weave through the trees and the mice that scamper along the forest floor – the oppressed, the downtrodden, the stateless, the confused, the scared. We write because it is beautiful, because stories endure, evoke, and inspire, and because our voices are our most powerful instruments.

Lucy:

As simple and as selfish as it may sound, I write in an attempt to create and preserve history. I enjoy challenging perspectives as much as the next writer does, but my ideas are not necessarily original. However, the natural evolution of thought through collective experiences means that there are a few other people out there (hopefully) who think the same way that I do, which is another reason why I write. But as a history major, I’ve also found that writing is my attempt to create and preserve history in my voice by simply recording moments of time and relevance and situating them in our context, but primarily amidst my personal fabric of existence. And it’s not necessarily the topics I like to write about that make me part of history (or anyone else who does any writing whatsoever in their life) but the fact that they came from specifically me, at an exact moment, with all of the experiences I’ve had so far that ultimately shape every word I put down.

Sam:

It seems written art nowadays is somewhat sidelined by more common mediums of entertainment, and people may sometimes ask what the point of writing is. Yet this question is usually asked when people are living life well. When people suffer, however, written art provides them an avenue to turn to, allowing them to find in the works of others the emotions that they feel are so unique that no one could understand. This provides solace and comfort in the knowledge that seemingly alienating experiences have happened to others before. Here, I believe Robin Williams’s monologue from Dead Poets Society provides an apt summation, “We do not read and write because it is cute, we read and write because we are members of the human race.”