Why Write? The Elusive Psychology of Authorship
I have no logical explanation for why I do this. Do you?
To become aware of the search is to be on to something. To not be on to something is to be in despair. — Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
I can identify with some accuracy the moment when I first became aware of my desire to write. It was 1980. I was 16. We had just read Camus’ “The Stranger” in third-year English. Somewhere near the middle of the book I was overcome with a sort of agitation. The flat, affectless voice of Mersault had become stuck like a dirge in my head. I guess I had no notebook at hand because I tore out the title page of my copy of the novel and covered it top to bottom on both sides with a sort of Holden-Caulfield-meets-Mersault type vocal-mashup, a monologue about how I wanted to write a book. I still have that page, a detail of which you see above. It is lying, as you read this, in a clear plastic sleeve atop several hundred pages of journal entries, written to no one in particular, that I’ve accumulated in the intervening years.
My contemplation of this little artifact today has raised some questions. And questioning is why we are here.
Why a book and not a newspaper article? Who was I writing to? Where did this impulse come from? And, most important — after more than 40 years, hundreds of frustrated attempts and a handful of vows to “quit writing” for my general health and happiness — why hasn’t it gone away?
Until that time, English had never been presented to me as anything more than a school subject. But a select group of my teachers at Moore Catholic High School in Staten Island began to change that by treating the books we read as high stakes affairs. They conveyed to us that good books were authentic reflections of real life, a real life somewhere if not here, of which we should all be aware. At least if you did not want to end up like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave. (My homage to the teacher who introduced me to that canonical work of philosophy can be found in the introduction to the book “Question Everything.”)
But sound pedagogy doesn’t explain why literature and philosophy clicked with me. I had a wonderful math teacher (thanks, Mr. Potter) who championed his subject just as ingeniously and vigorously. I got an A in that class but it didn’t stick. For some reason I still can not explain, some soft spot in my adolescent temperament was as ready for Camus, Salinger and Vonnegut as it was for the rock music that was pounding all day on the lunchroom jukebox and in my brain. I was as hungry for “The Stranger” and “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Catcher in the Rye” as it was for “Freebird,” “Ramble On” and “Street Fighting Man.” The hunger snuck up on me and took me by surprise.
Some forms of writing — letters, medical prescriptions, instruction manuals — make perfect sense: The audience and the desired result of each is clear. But who is the audience for the absolute “best” writing you or I can produce? Why spend months or years writing something that no one has asked for, that serves no practical use, that no one is wanting or expecting? I still find the psychology of this type of authorship to be a mystery. And I am inexplicably curious about every detail of this strange vocation, the production of writing of “lasting value” or “for posterity” or just plain “literature.” It seems, in fact, that I am often more interested in how others do it than in doing it myself.
Just today I tried to provide some students with an explanation of the difference between a romance novel and a work of literature. But I was really trying to explain it to myself. The romance novel, I posited, followed a formula set outside the creation of the work itself. Like plaster being poured into a mold. The structure and logic of the work of literature, on the other hand, the sound and shape of it, what “happens” in it, how it moves temporally, arises internally. The source of its own unfolding and progress is, in some respect, at least, itself. While planning is no doubt a part in many artist’s work, I believe that most such works are born in their becoming, and remain a mystery to its creator. I don’t know if this will make any sense to these young readers, but it was the best I could do.
I think that this amorphous, organic quality is a seductive and hypnotic one. In my mind I see a time-lapse image of a flower sprouting, unfurling and growing in unexpected directions. I watch it with fascination. But over time that uncertainty and unpredictability also repelled me and caused me to flee from its challenges for long stretches of my life. I know that it is a mark of philosophical or spiritual maturity to be comfortable in a state of uncertainty and unknowing. I aspire to it, partly because I know that artists must. But I still find it hard. I always have.
Thinking about the particular things I care so deeply about when most of the practical world does not, I often return to a beautiful, exceedingly tender autobiographical essay by the philosopher Richard Rorty, called Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (I was introduced to this essay by the philosopher and artist Megan Craig, and I urge you to read it if you were ever tempted to believe that philosophers of intellectual rigor don’t have beautiful souls). In it, Rorty writes that “accepting your finitude,” means, among other things, “accepting what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people.” This is not a perfect analogy, but it does say something to me about the futility of trying to justify the objects of our curiosity and passion. I’m now willing, for the time being, at least, to let that go, to just follow “what matters most,” or what seems to on a given morning, and see where it leads.
Part of a possible reason for this impulse and its persistence might be explained by the fact that this small reflection has found you here. Writers, even notetakers and diarists and scribblers, even the most solitary, seek to find their listeners, their readers, the Other with whom they can, even for a moment, become one — a Thou to their I, as Martin Buber has put it. In this context, a platform like this, which can be transactional, and is usually spoken of in terms of economic models, can make a deeper kind of sense. While much of the editing I’ve done has put the work of other writers in front of large public audiences, nearly 100 percent of the writing I’ve done in my life has been done in private, addressed to an imaginary reader, or no reader at all. Today, they are just sheets of paper in varying degrees of decomposition spilling out of torn binders. These many years later, I’ve come to believe that work that never reaches a reader is incomplete. In the coming weeks and months I hope to pull some of those pages out of their binders and give them new life.
I don’t know who you are right now. As I write this, you don’t yet exist. But any act of writing consists at least in part of faith — in this case, faith that some force in the universe will manifest you (and see, you are reading this, so it has), or that the Substack algorithm will find you and rouse you to read this (perhaps that is the force), and that my small attempt to make a connection in the world, to speak and to find a listener, to find a human to touch with my thoughts, might make this hour spent in contemplation and communication useful, meaningful, even somehow sacred.
If you have thoughts of your own along these lines you’d like to share, please leave a comment.
ha, I read all those as well, pretty much in the same order as you, but 20 years earlier. So, what does my elder wisdom say in helping you answer this burning Q? I dunno. However, I know these algorithms do no better a job than the old way (people, talking, writing, publishing as a community together face to face, ie. as in an old-fashioned newsroom). In fact, I'd say it's just made things worse, as most all techBro inventions have done with other things, like basic internet usage. I helped build this nightmare of scaremess u know as the internet. But it was not always so. Just like SubStack and Algos were never a choice, and I am not sure it's just because the tech was not there. I believe the people of the olden days would have said, f off techBro, get ur horse crap outta here, we are doing just fine without it. But all those people are dead, or silent it seems. And even the younger gen hates all of this, just listen to this once and you will understand: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI&si=9l3wTO2I3rVDbSz-
So writers out there, ya gunna stand for this?!? I'm not.
Great Rorty quote