why I write

so this is the first essay we had to write for my creative writing class.

Why I Write

           

Here is the problem. I’m not entirely sure why I write. There are several reasons I’m sure. I suppose I write for much the same reasons that singers sing and sewers sew; because it fills them up. It makes them happy, might be the reason they dole out to friends and family, who are really asking, “how do you expect to make a living out of writing?”. It’s probably easier to simply leave it at “it makes me happy”. Well, if we are being honest, that is partly true. But there is more.

Sure, writing makes me happy—but it also devastates me, drives me up a wall, drives me to tears, and makes me sleepy. Explain that? Maybe. The point is that writing fills me up with emotion, any emotion. It starts as words on a page, that, when read, spring to life and become “who’s” not “what’s”. The words become people, friends and enemies and that guy on the sidewalk avoiding eye contact with me. They expand and seep into the corners of my heart that have been empty for so long, waiting for the right word to come in and caulk that space with language. Writing is finding those words that come as close as possible to describing that emotion or experience or color, then writing it down and letting it be alive.

Reading over that last paragraph the ideas sound a bit lofty, but it makes me smile to think I have lofty thoughts. Maybe that’s why I write, to assure myself that my thoughts are valid—even if they’re lofty. I write to validate myself, my thoughts and ideas, and even my passions. It’s one thing to say, “I love you”, but it’s an entirely different thing to write it down. Writing it down solidifies your emotion and makes it a real moment in your life, a fact. I live a lot of my life in my head, thinking of words to describe every shape, concept and color. It’s only when I write these things down that they become real to me, otherwise they float around as day dreams and whimsy. They come out of my mouth as nonsense and stories that end awkwardly—ask anyone who has had the pleasure of speaking with me. But when I write something down it’s coherent and linear. Well, sometimes it’s linear anyway.

I write to be filled, but also to be emptied. All these thoughts in my head sometimes get the better of me and I do start living up there along with the gray matter. Often I feel that by writing things down, my mind can rest because it no longer has to hold that individual thought. The paper on which it’s written shares the thought with me, it takes half the burden, leaving more space for more thoughts. I’m trying to think of a better verb for this, but all I can think of is “to spill”. Words and images and colors spill out of my pencil and onto a page and I’m instantly relieved.

Colors keep coming up, so I think I should mention that I write so that I can see colors better. My eyesight is fine by the way, but colors are more than what you see. It’s how they taste and feel and sound in your mouth and temperature and emotion and aura and light and dark. Colors occupy my brain more than any other subject. I write to understand colors, and therefore the world around me. Crayola created some pretty neat names for colors, but I believe they are insufficient. There are at least a million different words for the color red—that’s a fact, maybe only because I’ve written it down, but a fact nonetheless!

I write to understand, to explain, to feel deeper and to feel more. I write because I like the look of letters on the page and how these, a, b and c’s, work together to represent meaning. I write because it’s beautiful to me.