Profound - Human Writes

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.

The question is, why do I write? Where did that impulse arise? How? Why? I don’t think that’s something I can ever know for sure, and probably it’s not one thing that has led me down the path of writing, but rather a combination of things thrown into the pot together have made me the man I am – and the writer I’ve become.

One of my earliest memories is reading The Shaggy Dog Story. I was reputedly three going on four at the time, and that was the first book of thousands I’ve gone on to read. My mum encouraged me to read. She’d been a singer once and had a creative bent. I inherited her love for music and reading, which we would share in the years to come.

I had an Aunt who was likewise a great reader. I’d receive a parcel from her containing books every Christmas and birthday. I was a rugged, tree-climbing boy who played sport with my mates and rode my dragster around the neighbourhood, but none of that stopped me from becoming an avid reader. In these early days – between, say, six and nine – I read a lot of Enid Blyton, particularly the Famous Five series.

The other influence on my reading habits was my grandfather. He was a gentle, quiet man whose greatest pleasure was sitting down with a good book. As a boy, I can recall going to the MCG with him to watch a test match – and on many occasions, he would stop into a bookshop, from which he’d invariably leave with another couple of books to add to his collection.

He had bookshelves full of books on every topic ranging across genres: fiction, non-fiction, history, philosophy, poetry, and so on. As I got older, I would range across his shelves and pluck something out to read. Often, it would be an old paperback with yellowing, brittle pages that no one knew anything about.

You can say then that I was steeped in a culture of reading. I couldn’t imagine not reading, and pity those who never learnt the pleasure of it.

None of that makes me a writer, though it’s good preparation for it. When did I first set pen to paper? Why?

At school, occasionally, we would be given creative writing assignments. Perhaps because I had read so much, I found I had a vivid and original imagination. I found delight in coming up with these plots and in the reaction to them. Still, I had no thought then of ever making anything more of it.

That only came after I left school and then by accident. I’d travelled to Sydney from Melbourne and stayed with my aunt in a great apartment in Watsons Bay. The sun shone, the beach was nearby, there was an alluring woman I fell for, and life was laconic.

One day, I just started writing. I don’t know where the notion came from, but it was a story touching upon the second war – I’d been a military buff – and it had philosophical elements, probably quite pretentious. From there, I began to write erratically with months in between and one or two occasions, probably years. I did it, but I didn’t see it as a profession. In any case, I had found myself with a career wearing a white collar.

It’s different now. Probably for the last fifteen years, I’ve been convinced this is what I’m meant to do. That’s the thing: you can’t stop yourself from writing. The words pile up in you, demanding to be written. They gotta get out somehow. As I said in my opening post, there’s mystery and wonder in this because I can never really understand how it works that way or where the words come from. I’m grateful, though.

To answer the question I started with, you must be curious about everything to be a writer. You walk down the street, you get on the tram, you catch up with your friends – whatever it is – there’s a part of your mind always observing, always ticking over, always asking questions.

The answers to those questions aren’t always readily available, but that’s where imagination plays a part. Curiosity breeds imagination, I think, though it doesn’t always take. On top of that is life experience. Combined all – curiosity, imagination, experience – and you have the necessary elements for creativity, and you can begin weaving worlds in your mind.

That’s as good as I get to explaining this right now, but I’m happy to get your viewpoints on the subject.

Tag: Profound

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