Why do you write? The impulse inwards and the impulse outwards

February 28, 2015

Today I took a Creative Writing workshop at the LSE Space For Thought Literary Festival, which I’d titled Why Do You Write? And Can Knowing That Even Help? It will soon be available as a podcast. It was good fun to run – and I tried out a couple of new writing exercises, but one thing I did that is quite standard fare is I asked the students to jot down, for themselves, their personal reasons for writing.

Now, if you’re a writer, and you feel like exploring this question, perhaps you’d take two minutes to jot down a few possible answers before reading on. That’s what I asked students to do in the workshop, and I think it’s worth doing blind, as it were, for reasons that will become clear.

So, before reading on, grab a pen and jot down six reasons why you write.

Or, you know, ignore that, roll your eyes, and read on.

One thing I’d noticed, in making my own personal list in preparation for the session, was the reasons divided reasonably easily into two categories: inward-oriented impulses, and those that turned outwards.

So, when I asked students to share their reasons with the room at large, and I wrote them up on the whiteboard, I divided them into two columns as I went. Here’s what they came up with – some of it compressed and paraphrased by me, for which I apologise.

Because I can	Communicate
Create	Entertain
Enjoyment	Reciprocate  – give back something for all the reading pleasure I’ve had
To make sense of things	Share
To keep my head from exploding	Protest
Compulsion	Reach an audience
Reflect on things	Money!
Explore myself and my self-identity	Make people laugh and cry
Explore my imagination
Capture moments
Overcome the fear of writing
Therapeutic reasons

 

And this was the list I then showed, that I’d come up with. (Some of it tongue-in-cheek)

Replicate the joy and intensity of reading	Get rich and famous
Understand something about yourself	Express or share something about yourself
Understand something about the world	Express or share something about the world
Emulate your favourite writer	Impose your ideas on others
The sheer thrill of creation	Contribute to the culture, or the conversation, as you see it
Entertain yourself	Impress others / make yourself seem more interesting / get laid

As you can see, many of the terms and reasons pop up in both lists, in some form or other. I’d pretty much decided on giving an equal balance between the two impulses, once I’d decided on that perhaps overly simplistic division, but I was interested to see that the students’ list was significantly longer than the outward one, while mine, if anything, erred towards the outward or external.

I say ‘simplistic’, but I do think there is a fundamental split here. We all of us write both for ourselves and for others, to some extent, but if you made a personal list perhaps you’d look at it now and ask yourself: which column do most of your reasons sit in? Are you a ‘for yourself’ writer, or a ‘for others’?

Someone whose answers sat squarely in the right hand column might be at risk of producing meretricious, programmatic, target-oriented, basically uninteresting writing, because they’re so fixated on the effect of their writing that they are blind to the workings of their own writing personality. But someone whose answers stick to the left-hand column might be producing work which doesn’t take that crucial step of reaching out and engaging with the world, which lacks the ambition and ego needed to make writing truly crucial to the reader.

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Written by Jonathan Gibbs Posted in Writing Tagged with creative writing, LSE, LSELitFest, writing