Why do we write? _______________________________
Or: what do you get when you cross a sociopath and a cockroach?
Some people say that writers write for immortality, so that some part of them can be left behind when they are gone, so that they will never be forgotten. However, that cannot be entirely true for all writers, or else why would Franz Kafka have asked his friend in his will to burn what would become his two most popular novels, The Trial and The Castle, after himself burning nearly all of his own writing during his lifetime?
Others say that we write to change the world, to communicate our ideas to one another, and thereby, hopefully, leave them changed. Indeed, none will deny the effect that written works have had on the course of human history. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Dante, Dumas, the great religious texts, and countless other written works have shaped the world we live in and our perception of it in a very real, completely literal way.
It would be difficult to say that there was ever a single work written that did not have as at least one of its aims the transformation, if only in some small way, of the mind or spirit of the reader. Perhaps a mere change in mood, or perhaps a change in the very way they see their lives, thus for all intents and purposes changing the world for them, and if such change leads them to action, then changing the world per se, for all people.
This is a great and terrible quality of writing, its ability to shape the world, despite being nothing more than ink on paper.
The meaning of a book is never the same to any two people. The writer and all readers will look at the same text and experience it differently, for that is how we experience life. Nevertheless, meaning is conveyed, and reliably so, though sometimes the meaning conveyed is quite opposite to the author’s intent, warped by the perceptions of other cultures and times, the centuries whittling away at the context in which it was written, leaving it orphaned in our minds, taking on a new, sometimes deleterious life, when once it was meant for health.
A possible example of this is the ubiquitous and seminal The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli, the 16th century Florentine civil servant. The Prince describes the ways by which one may gain political power by disregarding the well-being of others in favor of total self-indulgence via deception and violence. The content of the book has led to the creation of the word “Machiavellian,” based on his name, meaning someone who is totally unscrupulous and will stop at nothing, even harming others, to achieve their own ends, with nary a pang of conscience. Because of all this, many see Machiavelli himself as an evil person and advocating evil, or, even worse, take his book as an instruction manual and use it to justify their own cruel misdeeds.
There is a possibility, however, that the book was written as a satire, and that Machiavelli was lampooning the cruel upper class, Italian ruling families like the Borgia or the Medici, the latter of which had him imprisoned and tortured after conquering his home city-state.
This, however, is a minority view among scholars and, ultimately it is impossible to know what Machiavelli, or any author, has truly meant by their words, even if they state in other words elsewhere what they were trying to communicate more explicitly, for those words themselves cannot be trusted and are subject to interpretation.
As such, the power of words to communicate meaning, while plainly obvious, cannot be counted upon by the writer to do as they think. A writer may write a blog post, a short story, or fifteen novels, and the readership may never understand a single thing of what the author was trying to communicate, even if the material was written well, for such is the power of perspective. We need only take the most cursory glance at perhaps the most influential texts of all time, those foundational books which underpin the world’s great religions, to see the power of perspective. While no one can reasonably claim to have the one correct interpretation of these, or any other works, many do, and have throughout history, leading to the many religious wars of human history, wars fought in the name of these texts, even if the texts themselves denounce violence and warfare.
Communication, then, cannot be the sole, or even primary, purpose for writing. In this way, a book is like a person, or to be more specific, a child. A child is created by its parents, and they may have many aims for that child, hopes, dreams, and desires, and yet from the moment the child is born, the control over the child begins to slip from the parents’ hands and into the hands of the child, and indeed, from the very beginning the child will do things the parents do not want, intend, or expect. Sometimes these unanticipated actions result in joy for the parents, other times in frustration or even despair. A book is like this. Once published, an author can only exert so much control over its interpretation, until eventually it is totally out in the open and acting on its own, so to speak. It becomes its own object, totally separate from, and yet fully dependent on, the author, at least for the fact of its existence.
Another way in which a work of writing is like a child returns us to the first point: immortality. While individual humans die, the species lives on through reproduction. So, a writer’s memory, thoughts, personality, and even will can live on through their writing. A child is an extension of their parents, and yet totally separate from, and eventually independent of them.
However, as we saw before, not all writers want the effect of “immortality” one may achieve through writing. But Kafka is immortal, despite his desires to the contrary, because of his books. In that way they have already escaped his intentions, merely by existing. So, we see that books, like children, will both carry our memory and will forward into the world, and at the same time defy it.
There is one final similarity between the desire to procreate and the desire to write, one that will unify the discrepancies and contradictions of the previous two into a contiguous whole, and it is perhaps the most obvious and powerful of all three: pleasure, or passion in its various forms.
Just as Kafka who burned his books did not want his work to outlive him, and yet it did, and just how Machiavelli may not have wanted his work to be interpreted the way it is, there is likely one reason they both had in common for creating their works: they took pleasure in the process or had some deep passion for it. Machiavelli was obsessed with politics and felt most alive when he studied it. He said of his studies “Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death.”
Kafka took a more neurotic approach to writing but nonetheless valued it in the highest degree, if for different reasons. He called it a “form of prayer,” but also spoke of his urge to write as such: “The tremendous world I have inside my head, but how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it.” So, Kafka spoke of writing as superlative need, explaining his desire to be tortured rather than to keep his thoughts inside.
Machiavelli, who was physically tortured for his political stances, spoke of the great peace that the study of his chosen subject gave him, study that freed him from fear of death, that being perhaps the most powerful force of all in human nature, and yet it was nothing in the face of his desire to study, which studies outflowed in his writing.
So, whether we look at Kafka, who needed to write, but did not want it to outlive him, or Machiavelli, who greatly yearned to write, but was unable to control his legacy, we see a final similarity between the acts of writing and of procreation. Whether one does it for any of the potential ends it may be used for, most writers, like most humans who choose to procreate, do it simply for its own sake, finding in themselves either a great anxiety surrounding it, wherein such anxiety might be released, or in it a great peace, from which they draw strength.
In this the similarity is finally revealed; one does what they feel driven toward or what they feel they cannot live without, indeed, what they feel gives them the means to transcend pain and death, the outcomes of which cannot be controlled, no matter how hard we try.
Why do we write?
Because we must.
Garrison Dinsmore is an author and filmmaker who is currently working on the umpteenth rewrite of his forthcoming novel The Song of the Revenant: The Plea of the Dead. If you would like to experience more of his writing, click the links below:
Super Rare Films (comedy sketches, co-creator): https://www.youtube.com/@superrarefilms3754
The Way She Used to Be (short film, co-writer): https://vimeo.com/400798367
The Content Blog (lists, infographics): https://thecontentblog9.wordpress.com/
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