Why I Write
I was recently asked in a mini questionnaire for a convention website (True Believers FYI), “What’s your favourite thing about what you do?”, and it took me a while to think of an answer. It’s a question I had never pondered before, along with it’s big brother, “Why do you write?”
I write because I have to. Yes, ideally I make some money from it to support me so I can write more. No, it’s not to get myself noticed – if I could do this without ever having to promote myself in any way I would be a happy man. Yes, it’s because I am interested in hearing what other people make of my work. But most of all, it’s because I have always had stories, characters, events, scenes, snippets of dialogue and whatnot floating around in my head, and the only way to make sense of it all was to put them all into some kind of structured order. And it’s something I am internally compelled to do.
Right now I have dozens of ideas for books, novellas, short stories and graphic novels. They all exist in various stages of development, from fully formed foetuses almost ready to be delivered, to mere glints in the milkman’s eye of the mind – potential ideas waiting to merge with others to form an embryonic story. I doubt if I will ever be able to realise all of them in physical form before I log off from real life, so I get to pick and choose the best.
And, to go back to the original question, my favourite thing about writing is the ability to use words to create a person, to create a place, to create a plot that drives these people through these places. And that’s what I find amazing – it’s all just words. But each word is a little brick, and as a writer you are constantly building walls and rooms, sometimes knocking through or changing the floorplan all together, until finally you have a house. You have used words to build a structure of a story that makes sense from the moment you walk through the front door until the moment you find the skeleton bricked into the dining room wall cavity.
And with more metaphors than are probably safe to use in one blog post, that is why I write 🙂
What about you?
Tony.
