Forum / Why do you write?

Adam Sifre
Oct 21, 12:15pm

A. Because I have so many stories in my head, I just have to put them on paper.

B. I can't control it. My characters demand to be heard.

C. It's my passion.

D. Nothing was on TV.

This is practice for your next blog interview.

Question 2: When interviewers ask you this question, do you pretend that there are people out there, somewhere, who are interested in the answer?

Ann Bogle
Oct 21, 10:39pm

http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-i-write.html

Marcus Speh
Oct 22, 10:53am

http://fictionaut.com/stories/finnegan-flawnt/why-i-write

Adam Sifre
Oct 22, 01:31pm

Sometimes I write so I have something to link to.

Gary Hardaway
Oct 22, 09:15pm

It's the cheapest way I know of to make something.

Mathew Paust
Oct 22, 09:34pm

Keeps the fingers limber.

Adam Sifre
Oct 23, 12:19am

Surely, there are ways other than writing to do that.

Adam Sifre
Oct 23, 12:20am

Good answer, Gary

Lynn Beighley
Oct 23, 12:49am

Because I get read.

Ann Bogle
Oct 23, 03:26am

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature. - Susan Sontag

—as tweeted by Women Writers, July 14, 2014

Donald Barthelme — (paraphrase) — [He wrote] because it is the hardest and most interesting thing there is to do.

—nearly as reported on Fictionaut by James Robison (I am checking for it online)

Adam Sifre
Oct 23, 12:25pm

Lynn. You bloggers are so wordy.

Adam Sifre
Oct 23, 12:26pm

I write to be adored. It may not work, but it works better than anything else I've tried.

Everything legal, anyway.

Mathew Paust
Oct 23, 02:54pm

Because I'm good at it. -- Flannery O'Connor

Because I'm too slow mentally and inarticulate vocally to say what I want and need to say. -- me

Ann Bogle
Oct 23, 06:45pm

I am reading Rutkowski today. It is a coincidence that it is his bday besides ... he gives in an interview that boys acting stupid or playing dumb in high school had worked to win the attention of girls and that he sort of blew it by stressing smarts young. Good storyteller! Details! Swift and compact. The interview given by Meg Tuite is in Connotation Press. I got there looking for Marcus Speh's interview given by Mia Avramut. I found it but I went looking for how it is hyperlinked on the site and found Rutkowski. I feel a little distracted today. It was a great early morning, one egg in a stout, swirled with a fork.

Wesley Baines
Oct 28, 06:41am

I write to plant my influencing voice in other people's heads.

For the good, of course.

Adam Sifre
Oct 28, 12:23pm

I write because I like coffee, and everyone who likes coffee, writes. Anyone who visits a Starbucks knows that.

Henry Standing Bear
Oct 31, 01:42pm

I like Flannery O' Conner's answer when asked this question. She said:

"Because I'm good at it."

Personally, I don't have an answer of my own for this, but, damn, I like her take on it.

Adam Sifre
Oct 31, 10:00pm

Matthew already used that quote. You have to come up with another answer.

Adam Sifre
Oct 31, 10:01pm

"I write so my wife thinks I'm doing something. As soon as she falls asleep thought, it's all porn and XBoX"
- Splinker.

Gary Hardaway
Nov 01, 12:12am

I write in order to piss off the folks who own most of the assets we've divided the planet into.

Adam Sifre
Nov 01, 07:45pm

The Jews??

Gary Hardaway
Nov 01, 09:39pm

No, The Freemasons. And Presbyterians.

Ann Bogle
Nov 02, 11:00am

http://annbogle.blogspot.com/2007/01/fictions-properties.html

Ann Bogle
Nov 02, 11:06am

Quotations I gathered of Zadie Smith, Mary Gordon, Christopher Isherwood, and William Mills Todd III

Adam Sifre
Nov 02, 11:09pm

Feel free to use any of my quotes. All I ask is that my name is ahead of Gordon's on the Marque.

Henry Standing Bear
Nov 06, 12:34pm

Well, okie dokes, then. I'll try another answer:

I don't know why I write. There is no money in it, no recognition outside of a small but loyal community of other writers, no release, no resolution, no break from the exacting labor of it at all. It's hard every single day and most days several hours of work only produces, at best, a few hundred good words. Then, when the words are coming I look around hoping to tell someone how well it's going and there's no one, really. I occasionally post on social media some kind of update about this strange day of progress only to worry that someone will say I've tripped into a "humble brag" when all was trying to do was share a rare moment with people who understand and can relate. So, I don't know why I write. There may be no reason at all, for what it's worth.

Brenda Bishop Blakey
Nov 06, 01:46pm

I like what everyone is saying about this topic. There is so much logic, humor, and openness in the comments. I was tapped by the writing call in my teens and decided to postpone actively participating until I was much older, like 50 years old. I figured by the time I was 50 I would have a lot to write about. I have pondered long and hard about this and want to share my thoughts.

Writing is a form of madness and once one is infected, it forever remains in the body, mind, and spirit. This applies to each writer, even the ones who try to shut it all down and go on to find different forms of expression.

Many people will admit to not knowing why they write. The writing compulsion is an addiction for which there is no 12-step program. There is only the condition itself and, finally, death. Witness the early opt-out by Buk and the other suicides, famous and infamous alike.

So, my personal answer is, I write because I am addicted to it and I will write until I die of natural causes. It is because we think we are unique and special that leads to all the in-fighting and makes the writer landscape feel unkind. I wrote a poem about this once but it was too much truth.

Carol Reid
Nov 06, 03:43pm

I've had a different answer for "why I write" in every decade of my life, and a number of them contradict each other.I'm beginning a new decade with the answer that I write because I want my reader to know me.

Mathew Paust
Nov 06, 03:48pm

I like that, Carol.

As for Bukowski, here's what he wrote to a friend: "Somebody at one of these places [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it."

Chris Okum
Nov 06, 04:35pm

I write so I have something to read.

Letitia Coyne
Nov 06, 08:50pm

To make and inhabit realities in which I have a sense of control, and to be as many people as I like without being forced to take medication.

Lxx

Gary Hardaway
Nov 06, 09:26pm

Leticia has the best answer! Or one I really want to steal, anyway.

Adam Sifre
Nov 07, 12:30pm

As for Bukowski, here's what he wrote to a friend: "Somebody at one of these places [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it."

What kind of friggin insects were in Bukowski's neighborhood?

Adam Sifre
Nov 07, 12:30pm

As for Bukowski, here's what he wrote to a friend: "Somebody at one of these places [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it."

What kind of friggin insects were in Bukowski's neighborhood?

Mathew Paust
Nov 07, 08:42pm

They're extinct now.

Mathew Paust
Nov 07, 08:44pm

All 15 of my selves like Letitia's, too.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Dec 10, 12:48pm

I've always hated this question, seems that trying to answer it would be more a struggle in finding something to say that hasn't been said before. I prefer to save my energy for writing poetry itself.

Mathew Paust
Dec 11, 06:18pm

SDR, the thread was started by a humorist. Knowing something of Adam's work I doubt very seriously if he expected his question to be taken very seriously.

Lucinda Kempe
Dec 11, 08:30pm

I write because to figure out what it is I want to say.

Lucinda Kempe
Dec 12, 02:10am

I write to figure out what I want to say. See. :-)

Mathew Paust
Dec 14, 08:49pm

The real reason--truth time now: I have ADD, and am not worth a tinker's damn (whatever the hell that is) in conversations. Too much going on in my head at one time. I can't communicate clearly unless I've taken the time to write it out. Like Lucinda said, this is where I decide what it is precisely I want to say.
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