Why do you write what you write? I often wonder that. It’s not so much where the stories come from, more: why these stories? Why do I write stories of this kind and someone else something completely different?
It can only be how you’re made, how you think and see, how you interact with the world about you. Whatever you write today was likely born many years ago and shaped by experience in the time since. What you write is a product of who you are, and the person you are has been a long time in the making.
We share that in common all of us, whether we write or not. We’re subject to the forces of nature and random chance. Domestic imperatives dictate many of our choices, and capricious personality much of the rest. It’s different for everyone, but everyone has a perspective that evolves with time and experience, whether conscious or not. We take on a bias. We learn, or perhaps we don’t. We see through a subjective lens, and from that, we form attitude – and maybe even philosophy. We each become our own distinct character.
Not all of us write about it, though. It occurs to only very few. I can only speak for myself, but curiosity motivates me to write. I want to explore character. I want to travel back from effect to see the cause, complex and shrouded in mystery it so often is. I don’t pretend to understand, but the act of writing – for me – is a means towards understanding. I write, and often afterwards, I’m surprised at what I’ve written. I’ve written things with more insight than I was aware of as if the act of writing dragged it up from some hidden place in me.
But why the things I write? The answer to that is always personal, which the writing seeks to expose. Once more, there’s a distance between what I know and who my true self is. What I write comes from that true self, up from the depths, uninterpreted. The person who writes of it is like an observer trying to make sense of it. I’m like a witness looking in through a window, trying to untangle what my eyes can see.
It’s imagination that makes a story of that. Experience, that inner, actual being, presents a sense of something you seek to explore through the means of fiction. It’s understanding you seek, and you search for it in deconstructing it into the form of a story.
That’s the process, more or less, or at least the best I can figure it. Why these stories? I don’t know exactly, except that they come from inside me, and it’s my job as a writer to decode them.
To be clear, I do this for myself because I want to understand. It may be different for other writers, but for me, it’s personal. These are mysteries I want to engage in. I feel them in me every day, something rich and sometimes bewildering – but vibrant too, as if it has a pulse and is true. I’m grateful to be the man I am.