Reasons to write

Although my love for writing came late, I think I’d always had a special regard for the power of the written word: the way life – with all its colours and vicissitudes – can be funnelled into the cool, clinical science of grammar and syntax, sentences and spellings; a domain of rules and laws.

I remember coming across the words of American memoirist, Dani Shapiro, a few years ago – who said writing allowed her to ‘create order out of chaos’ – and thinking that there was something so recognisable about that explanation.

Writing gives things shape, maps reality, annotates our imaginations, and, at its core, provides a way to explore and organise the things we think, feel and believe…

And so, in many ways my reasons for beginning were unconscious and latent. There was no great plan, no carefully schemed plot. I’m not sure, at the outset, there was necessarily even an aim. But there was a feeling, or perhaps just the hint of one, that began with a question posed during an email exchange with a friend, asking that I describe the ineffable depression I’d felt submerged in for the five years that had preceded their query.

‘Don’t tell me how it feels,’ she’d said, ‘that may be too big for me to grasp. Just tell me, if it were some kind of entity, or creature, what would this depression you’ve known all this time be like?’

A curious exercise, no? And yet the encouragement I received in response to what I wrote, along with the catharsis I’d felt in writing it, is what ignited this journey, by providing my initial impetus to write. Because somehow now there it was, this elusive nebulous thing, my years-long tormentor with its cacophony of dull bleak absence distilled on the page for me to see and engage with, and, perhaps, even destroy. But how can it be destroyed on the page if not by a character within it? And how can that character be if not within some kind of context, or world? And what must that world be like if it cannot be like this one? And in this way, as that initial first paragraph evolved into reams and then pages of writing, my first novel, Lost Gods, was born.

And so, this is why I write; in a way perhaps it’s why we all write – not primarily to tell stories, but to create worlds in which to speak to ourselves of things we don’t understand. To find, through our fictions, a space, one step removed, where sheltered by the comforting cocoon of the fantastical,
we can examine and understand those parts of ourselves that are most quintessential, most human, and thus, like our own organs, most inexplicable and difficult to see.

For if it is true, as Dostoevsky once wrote, that we cannot ‘live and have no story to tell’, then perhaps it is equally true that there is no story that can be told without somehow teaching us how to live.

A recording of this talk can be found at writersmosaic.org.uk