Why I Write

Half of this was originally published in January 2012; the other half is new. Click here for a printer-friendly version of this blog post.

Artwork: Memory Jar, by Donato Giancola

Why I Write

This morning I was thinking about how I preoccupied I used to be with my blog stats. I would obsess about how many clicks each blog post got, and when the numbers were higher or lower than average, I'd wrack my brain to figure out why, so that I could keep giving the public what they wanted.

This obsession proved to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it helped me to be a better writer, since I cared about the number of regular readers I had. On the other hand, it created undue pressure which often made it harder to write.

This got me thinking about why I write, in general.

Specifically, it got me thinking about why I have cared less and less about numbers with each year that goes by. And, as writers are wont to do, I had a desire to write about this topic.

At first I planned to write out my own thoughts on this matter. However, I've been perusing what other writers have written about writing - many of whom write for the same reasons as I do. In this post, I'd like to share some of these excerpts. Maybe some day I'll write my own post on why I write.

Here are excerpts from three writers whose reasons for writing align with my own:

George Orwell: Writing for "Political" Purposes

I'll begin with a short quotation from George Orwell's Why I Write (1946). Orwell states that "Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose." Of these four motives, I find that I relate most to the fourth, which he terms "political purpose." He explains that he is "using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after." Here is the paragraph that jumped out to me:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. 

I have chosen to lead with this Orwell quotation because it reflects my original motive for writing. When I was in high school I used to want to be a journalist. Once I converted to Judaism and began learning Torah, some of that journalistic zeal and integrity (in that order) became diverted towards the goal of bringing awareness to "authentic Judaism." As a convert who found himself among many FFB (frum from birth) Jews who didn't understand what they were doing or why they were doing it, I felt the urge to reveal the truth that I had learned and share it with others. 

Unfortunately, due to the sorry state that Klal Yisrael is in - and due to my fiery personality - many of these posts ended up with a greater emphasis on sur me'ra ("turn away from bad") than aseh tov ("do good"). My old blog was filled with polemical posts and polemical language. I really didn't hold back, especially when I felt that "sense of injustice ... because there is some lie that I want to expose." 

Over the years I've definitely dialed down the tone in my writing and teaching. I now focus more on what Torah is than what Torah is not. Yet, there is still a strong political character (as defined by Orwell) to my writing, which is also present in my teaching. I am still passionate when it comes to sharing my understanding of Judaism and contrasting it with other views that are out there. I'm just not as "in your face" as I was in my younger days. 
William Stafford: Writing for Discovery

The next few excerpts are from A Way of Writing (1970) by the poet William Stafford. (Full disclosure: I'm not a poetry guy, and haven't read any of Stafford's writings except for what I'm about to share.) This first quotation is the main reason why I write:

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions, or--but wait! …

For me, writing is a method of thinking. I can achieve a depth of understanding and a degree of clarity in writing that I can't obtain in any other way. Most of the time when I set out to write a blog post, the full idea isn't completely formed in my mind. The process of writing brings the idea to fruition. 

Stafford continues with a point that touches upon one of the major obstacles I face from time to time: the unwillingness to allow myself to "fail":

I must be willing to fail. If I am to keep on writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards. I must get into action and not let anything stop me, or even slow me much. By "standards" I do not mean "correctness" spelling, punctuation, and so on. These details become mechanical for anyone who writes for a while. I am thinking about such matters as social significance, positive values, consistency, etc. ... I resolutely disregard these. Something better, greater, is happening! I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on. I am making something new, something that has not been judged before. Later others -- and maybe I myself -- will make judgments. Now, I am headlong to discover. Any distraction may harm the creating.

I write best when I'm not worried about meeting my self-imposed standards. I have learned to ignore my inner need to write chidushim (innovations), or posts of "importance," or posts that people will care about. The ability to do this has not come easily. I have written about this struggle at length in Playing with Torah and Am I Qualified to Write this Blog? 

Chazal (Avos 4:1) teach: "ein ha'bayshan lomeid" ("One who is embarrassed doesn't learn"). If you wish to advance when learning with your rebbi, with your chavrusa, or even by yourself, you must be willing to "fail." I use the quotation marks because I don't consider this to be a failure. To realize that you've erred is a success, since it allows you to move closer to the truth.

When I write a blog post, I know it's possible that I'll make mistakes - but if I allowed this to stop me, then my writing would suffer, and so would my learning. (And so would the readers who gain from what I write.)

Stafford concludes with a beautiful summary of the activity of writing:

[Writing] itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

I thrive off of this experience of freedom in the process of writing. This is what allows me to sit down and write in an uninterrupted flow for hours on end. The joy of intellectual exploration and expression is intoxicating.

Richard Mitchell: Writing for Self-knowledge

The third and final excerpt is from a speech given by one of my favorite writers, Richard Mitchell. The speech, entitled Writing Against Your Life (1986), was given by Mitchell at a writers' conference in Southern Carolina. This speech became the basis of Richard Mitchell's greatest book, The Gift of Fire (1999), which is one of my favorite books of all time.

I am really tempted to excerpt the entire speech, but I'm afraid that will make this post appear too long. Here is the conclusion of the speech, which is my favorite part. I encourage you to read the whole thing, if you have time. Bear in mind that Mitchell was speaking to aspiring writers:

I am talking here of course of the kind of writing that I do. I don't write fiction, I don't know how to write fiction; I don't make characters, I don't know how to make characters; I don't have plots, I don't know how to make plots--all I do is try to think on the page--but I have read numbers of the works of those who makes plots, and write fiction, and know how to do that, and there is no difference. There is no difference there whatsoever. They make, insofar as they can, the truth. They make true human beings, who in true human predicaments, seek the truth for themselves. They make there all of the agony and joy, both, that it is to be a human being, coming into self-knowledge or suffering in its lack. As a matter of fact they make it far better than any discursive writer -- like this one -- can do, and they make it in drama, and they make it in lit, and they make it in living before our eyes, and it is the search for truth ... and whether or not you know, the difference between a good book and a bad book, I don't know -- and I don't know the difference between a good book and a bad book -- but you do know the difference between a true book and a false book. That is the real distinction. And if you will think about it a false book is whoring, or a false book is parroting; or a false book is a book in which the author -- I loved what you said about this this morning, Jane -- you write for yourself. And it goes further: I think you write because of yourself. It is you who are illuminated by what you write; and what is the nature of that illumination? It has one simple name -- although the terms underneath the name are numerous and complicated -- and that is self-knowledge ...

Now, if you take up writing seriously, I can't promise this, but I can hope this: I hope that it will make you profoundly unhappy. I hope that every day will bring you some bad news from the frontier of that unknown territory in which you work. I hope every day you rise up from your desk and say, "God, what a fool I was yesterday!" So that you can say that again tomorrow. And thus write against your life.  

There was a very popular whoring book around lately -- I don't know, it hasn't been for some time, I can't remember when, it was called "I'm Okay" -- uh, something -- "I'm Okay, You're Okay." Oh, what pleasant news. Believe me, you'll never lose money by telling people how nice they are. You'll never lose money by telling people, "Hey! Don't worry about your miserable rotten behavior and your perversions, and your lies, and your thefts! You're okay!" No one will blame you for this, and you may actually do quite well. I don't know about you -- I suspect, but I don't know about you -- however I will tell you this: I am not okay. I am not okay. I do not carefully define my terms when I think. I do not test, rigidly, as though I were a stranger, every one of my quaint and curious notions, prejudices, and beliefs, I do not do this, I am not okay. I lie. Whether I lie to you is none of your damn business; I lie to me, as to what I am and how it is in me. And I am not okay. (And I don't think you're okay either, but all I can do is suspect that.)  

Okayness does not ever come; I'm sure of that. But writing is the path towards it, and it's a path that hurts.  

The main point of the gift of Prometheus (i.e. the gift of mind), I think, is this. He made of us, with that gift -- by the way I'm a literal fundamentalist where the myth of Prometheus is concerned, you'll understand -- but by that gift, he made us absolutely unique in the universe, as far as we know. Before, all blindly floundering on, which is roughly as Aeschylus puts it, we were like the zebras, or the gnus (it's always good to mention the gnus): When bumped from the left, we veered to the right. And when bumped from the right, we veered to the left. We responded, perhaps very successfully as the zebras and the gnus do, matter of fact; but in a sense we lived what I think of as a satellite life. We lived, really, like moons. The moon ... shines. But not of herself. The moon is beautiful, but her beauty is provided for us by another power, the sun. The sun ... the sun does the sun. We do not see the sun by reflected light, we see the sun by its own light, and the day after Prometheus gave us that gift we who were satellites, creatures like others, entirely -- flowing -- where influence came, we became a new creature, something entirely different, all of us. You, you, you did. From having been a moon, you became a sun. The energy is in you. It starts in here. It has its home, its dwelling place, in here. Not in the world. Not in society. Not in your family. Not in your political party. Not in your church -- here is the life, and here is the light. Who of us knows that light? And who of us knows much about it? Damn few.  

Any serious work that a human being does must be looking for this light. And if you don't find this light, you will be able to write, and to be a writer -- either as a parrot or a whore, of course. But you'll never find the truth. Perhaps you'll never miss it, as a matter of fact I think the worst of them don't. But you will miss it. Because I am telling you this. I am a very arrogant schoolteacher; when people sit before me as though they are students, I imagine that they want to hear what I have to say and so I tell them what I have to say, and I tell them that because I have told you this, now you must be different, or deliberately reject some light. Go ahead and do that, if you will. But if you do pursue it, if you take this step from unknowing into knowing, you do walk a dangerous, perhaps even a deadly path; but it's the only path. I encourage no one to do this. But those of you who do it, and will do it, I will tell you this -- and I will tell you this as a command, because you can walk out now before you hear this command, but I'm going to give you this command:  

Don't -- shine.  

Don't seek to shine.  

Burn.

Wow! The first time I read this, I felt like Mitchell was speaking directly to me. He made me realize why I am driven to write: I write to know myself. I write because writing allows me to get my beliefs, values, and feelings out there, on paper (or a screen), at arm's length, so that I can examine them and get to know who I am - and by doing this, become a better person. 

Seneca

At the beginning of this post I mentioned that I used to be obsessed with tracking the number of readers I had, and that this obsession gradually wore off. Somewhere along the way I came across a quotation from Seneca in Letter #7 which explained to me why I became less focused on the number of readers:

Equally good is the answer given by the person, whoever it was (his identity is uncertain), who when asked what was the object of all the trouble he took over a piece of craftsmanship when it would never reach more than a very few people, replied: “A few is enough for me; so is one; and so is none.”

The more I have developed as a writer, the more this statement has resonated with me. All of the writing-motives I've listed here - Stafford's, Mitchell's, and in my case, even Orwell's - are selfish motives. I write primarily for myself, and although there is more potential for constructive criticism when more readers read by writing, the act of writing is something I do by myself, and for myself. Thus, even if nobody reads what I have written - and believe me, I've labored for hours on posts which have never seen the light of day - then the effort was still worthwhile for all of the aforementioned reasons. 

Conclusion

I laughed just now because I know that this is one of the blog posts I write which will get fewer readers than average ... and I really don't care! And that makes me happy! 

Here I have outlined three of my reasons for writing, at this stage of my life. Moreover, my writing of these three reasons is in line with these three reasons. This post was written to make a point about writing (political), and to help me clarify my thoughts about writing (discovery), and to help me come to terms with why I write (self-knowledge). 

That, to my mind, makes this a successful blog post. And with all due respect to my readers, my mind matters to me the most. :)