Why Do We Write?
This was the somewhat enigmatic and inciting title of the first of my classes this week. To provide a definitive answer feels almost as arbitrary as trying to count the grains of sand on a beach, or to count the stars in the sky. It’s also how I (wrongly) felt when faced with trying to work out complicated maths equations — that there’s no right answer. In fact, I’m wrong again, because instead of there being no right answer, there is actually no wrong answer here. The reasons for people to write are as numerous as there are people who write.
As with any course, this was that first meeting full of self-conscious, awkward introductions. For myself, this involved complete panic and a need to find the most self-effacing method of sharing the needed information as quickly as possible. I think I may have vaguely said something useful, but I’m almost certain they will have learned more about me from the speed at which I talk and the sheer panic on my face than they will have learned from my words. The joys of Zoom.
What we didn’t really talk about, however, was why we – as individuals – write. I guess that’s quite a deep and personal thing to share in a first encounter with a group of people. However, I’m a firm believer in understanding why you’re in the room before you try to enter it.
So why do I write?
For me, I started writing when I was in my teens because it was an escape. I hated school, or rather, I hated being surrounded by people that seemed to dislike me for no reason I could honestly understand.
I didn’t really enjoy journaling. Writing your innermost thoughts down on paper where anyone could read them seemed, to me, like a bloody dangerous thing to do. Anyone could find them. Anyone could read them. That meant anyone could use them against you. I remember trying to keep a journal for a few years in my later teens, before panicking and then trying to burn it in the back garden. It was raining, the pages wouldn’t catch light in the fireproof bowl and when they eventually caught fire, I quickly worried the neighbours would spot the smoke and cause panic. I swiftly discovered that water can be just as useful to destroy paper, and after mulching the black ashes and pulpy mess together until there would be no way of salvaging even a word of my innermost horrors and fears on the pages, I promptly threw the whole soggy mess in the bin.
Instead of journalling, I wrote stories. Or rather, I tried to. As I was a confirmed swot, none of the teachers batted an eyelid when I asked for more of the lovely hardback lined exercise books we used to take notes in. I sequestered at least three away, spending several years pouring out variations and drafts of a very early version of my Singing Stones series. Reader – those drafts are awful. However, thanks to the staying power of bic biro and those hardback notebooks, I still have them. They still get looked at when I’m plotting and re-plotting Rufia’s fate.
The moment I think I realised I really enjoyed telling stories was during my GCSEs. We had to do a piece of creative writing for coursework. Fed up with the exhausting tropes of the fantasy stories I was reading, I put together a rather scathing and cynical take on a detective novel that still makes me chuckle to this day.
Who Killed Harry Potter saw a dinner party attended by various fantasy characters, investigating the murder of the eponymous wizard. Cinderella, the hostess, was recently divorced from Prince Charming and struggling to maintain the castle in fairyland, since she’d only got the castle and none of the money in the settlement. Frodo, Aragorn and Arwen turned up, in the roles of a drug dealer, a peg-legged Scottish alcoholic, and kleptomaniac elvish maiden who maintained her ethereal glow by stuffing a torch between her boobs, respectively. Rather delightfully, that torch would click on and off as Arwen’s buxom heaved during melodramatic moments of the story. Hermione and Draco were both there. Decades ahead of the “Dramione” fan fiction explosion, I had Hermione continually rejecting the obnoxious Harry’s advances and hooking up with Draco instead. (I will still never understand why Ron and Hermione were a thing). However, Draco had a penchant for sniffing the cans of the hairspray he needed to keep his hair so smooth, and Hermione had a terrible lisp that meant no one understood what she said, even if it was clever. As for the murder? Well, it was all investigated by Galadriel, wearing a vivid pink trench coat and deerstalker. The whole crime was unravelled by the presence of a latticework floor, which meant Aragorn couldn’t possibly have made his way across it with his peg leg. The murder weapon? Cinderella’s glass slipper to the neck, naturally.
On reflection, I was going through one of the more awful and awkward periods of my life when I wrote that story. That it brought so much joy to my English teacher that it got passed around the staff room was a solace that I don’t think those teachers will ever understand. Despite how difficult I was finding the world and most people around me, I could still make someone smile or laugh. My stories could do that. That made me feel like perhaps there would be better things ahead in life that I couldn’t see yet. Writing saved me. Time and time again.
In recent years, playing tabletop roleplaying games has given me reams and realms of characters that have stories in need of telling. In diving into recording what happened to my first D&D character, I rediscovered a love of writing that had sadly become dormant since the days of brutally murdering “the boy who lived.”
So why do I write now?
The same reasons, to be honest. As someone who suffers from several chronic illnesses and diseases, there are often more painful and rubbish days in my life than there are brilliant, glowy wonderful ones. Writing lets me get away from the bad, just for a while. Writing lets me be in the shoes of someone else. Writing lets me see both the real world and imagined ones through eyes and minds that have the tools to face the different challenges life brings in a way that I never could. It lets me escape feeling rubbish, for a moment or two, to walk next to a dragon and pat its scales, feeling instead the warm huff of its breath as it enjoys scritches. It lets me wield a sword and protect others from hurts I would never see them face, using fencing skills that I never had the chance or the energy to learn in real life. It lets me be all the things that my imagination is capable of and that my body can’t quite keep up with. Writing helps me to survive. And if along the way, I can tell a story that helps someone else to feel better about things, even for a moment? Well, that’s all the more reason to keep going, isn’t it?