Chapter 1 - Why Write?

It’s evidently not for money or fame or family therapy. In Writer's Mind by Richard Cohen © 1995, he suggests that people who write do so because it is part of their character; it is who they are. Cohen describes writing as a process that gives life to what is written. He uses a vivid metaphor: writers move “crabwise” from paper to life and life to paper. In this process, writers come alive and create themselves.

In considering my reasons to write, I am deeply affected by Marcel Proust’s reasons for writing his series In Search of Lost Time. He wanted to reclaim tender, personal memories that were lost to him simply through living. His memory of being served Madeline cookies dipped in tea is perhaps the most famous of them, but he shares other memories, as well, as they startle to the surface from a misplaced past.

These memories, the way he experienced them, the emotions he felt, his consciousness of them, were as much as part of what it meant to be Proust as his body or his thoughts or other people’s knowledge of him. He seemed to sense that these memories, the particular conscious experience he brought to the world, soon would expire bodily with him; in fact, he died before finishing the editing and revising of the final books of In Search of Lost Time. Reclaiming memories, and the promise of preserving one’s conscious experience of them, beyond one’s own death, seems an important reason to write.

The bookshelf for this chapter is:

• Writing Life by Annie Dillard
  
• The Courage to Create by Rollo May
  
• Ake: Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka
  
• Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike
  
• One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
  
• Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf
  
• and the poem, “Prelude,” by William Wordsworth.

Reading this works, I’ll consider what responses these writers might give to these questions (and what responses I have):

• Why write?
  
• What’s the writing experience like? Physically? Emotionally?
  
• What are a writer's spiritual and emotional sources?
  
• How can one overcome the anxiety over creating something?
  
• What does it mean to come to the consciousness that one is a writer?
  
• What uses are the uses of writing?