Because I have to. That’s why I write. That’s my cynical answer anyway, but my real answer is different and more complicated, because my writing that isn’t force on me is more important and meaningful to me. In almost every classroom, beginning in elementary school, teachers force their students to write, because it shows understanding of the course material, whether it’s about a novel in English class or simply a description of your thought process on a particular math problem.
It’s true that the majority of the writing I do is forced upon me by the fear of a poor grade in a class, but claiming that as the sole reason I write is an, admittedly, exaggerated, cheeky assertion. Rather than give the impression of writing as a chore, I, instead, mean to emphasize its importance. Teachers make their students write, because it’s the most organized, purest form of communication that one is capable of. Writing shows your understanding of some civil war battle that as well as it expresses your thoughts and feelings.
That’s the real reason I write. Joan Didion says in her essay on the same topic, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means” (“Why I Write.” When I sit down to write – for myself, not my teacher – Didion’s own thoughts on writing are quite similar to my own. At times, I am as clueless about my own thoughts and emotions as someone passing me in the street. Writing takes the jumbles of feelings, thoughts, sights and consolidates them, organizes them, and allows me to glean greater understanding into my own mind. Without writing, I can only reach the surface of my thoughts, because writing allows me to simultaneously contemplate and organize my thoughts. My pen touches the paper and as I write down my thoughts and feelings, I think about them, and as my understanding grows, they evolve and take shape. Before I know it, I have pages of writing that reveals ideas I didn’t even know I had, and upon rereading it, I can map out my thought process as well.
That’s why I write when I’m troubled or confused. My mind spins and races at times and even I am not able to make sense of what is swirling around in my head. I don’t keep a journal in a traditional sense; I don’t write down the mundane details of my day, but I do make sense of my feelings through writing, because writing has a magical way of attaching reason and meaning to a lone, stray feeling. Take something as simple as being nervous for a presentation in class. It’s not difficult to see why I would be nervous, but exploring exactly what I’m afraid of is both enlightening and comforting. Once I start writing to explore that simple case of fear, I realize I’m not afraid of public speaking. I know I prepared well. So why am I nervous? That’s just the short version, but the ultimate conclusion was that I don’t have any reason to be afraid. It’s therapeutic to map out emotions like that, and though it, in this case, does not completely erase my anxiety ahead of the presentation, it makes me feel a lot better.
I write a lot during difficult periods in my life to make sense of it all and to see my thoughts in an organized sequence after careful reflection. I have the ability to capture those fleeting and fleeing feelings and ideas – in my mind, not unlike capturing a firefly. Like a firefly, my thoughts flutter around in the dark, and it is my job as a writer to capture them before they go dark, to preserve them and understand them. Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” expresses this idea in different words. In her essay Didion describes her notebook and its contents. Much of it, to anyone else, would seem meaningless, trivial, and at times, completely false. Didion’s notebook contains scraps of random information that even she, at times, can’t remember the purpose of, but it does not matter:
We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker (“On Keeping a Notebook).
When I write an essay that I know will be handed in and graded, it, of course, has to be correct and express what the teacher wants me to express. But, when I’m writing for me, to consolidate my thoughts and emotions, there is no one to hold me accountable for facts or any other criterion except for my own. While to some, it might seem odd that, as Didion states, the verity of facts are inconsequential, sometimes Didion’s – and my – perception of an event is not the same as how a neutral bystander would view it:
Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow (“On Keeping a Notebook”).
Take my first day of 11th grade, for instance. I had just, a couple of weeks earlier, moved to North Carolina from Connecticut. Everything was new and scary. Everyone was greeting friends they hadn’t seen in three months; everyone was smiling and laughing. At that time, I wrote only if I had to. It’s not that I didn’t like writing, it’s just that with all of my homework each night, writing for fun just didn’t occur to me. But that changed after my writing class that year. It was just a basic writing class, but the broad, free prompts allowed me to express myself. Moving, at that time, was one of the most important events of my life, and my writing reflected that. When I wrote about starting school in Charlotte, I didn’t write about the smiles or the hugs between the friends; I wrote about how alone I felt. To me, it seemed that everyone was in a circle of friends with their backs to me. I was the lone person, boxed out and invisible. Someone else would not have noticed; someone else would probably just seen a crowd of smiles. It doesn’t matter what really happened, because my writing, as Didion says about her journal, is about “the implacable ‘I'” (“On Keeping a Notebook”).
Not all of my writing, however, is personal or forced upon me. Some of it is both willing and practical. Much of my writing has a distinct purpose. Most weeks, as part of my job for the Old Gold & Black, I write an opinion article. In contrast to writing whose sole purpose is self-expression, these articles are heavily reliant on facts. I, in my articles, attempt to convince the reader of something that I see as self-evident, something, to my surprise, others do not view the same way I do. One of my most recent articles was on a pressing current event: whether or not the United States, and other countries, should allow Syrian refugees to enter the country to escape the violent Syrian civil war in the wake of the attacks in Paris. Alhough one of the attackers appeared to have entered France as a Syrian refugee, I argued that countries should not reject refugees out of fear. I was surprised and disgusted that some lawmakers proposed only allowing Christian refugees into the country even though millions of all religions were subject to violence and death in their home country. My emotions were certainly involved in my article, but the primary purpose of it was to convince others to change their mind, or in the words of George Orwell in his “Why I Write,” “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice … 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” (Orwell).
I describe my purpose in writing an opinion article as more factual and less emotional, but I do not mean to make it sound like these qualities have to be mutually exclusive, because sometimes I try to change peoples’ mind based on how I feel, but unlike my more personal writing, it isn’t just about Didion’s “implacable ‘I'”. One of the articles that I have written over the past two years that is most important to be was titled, “‘Introverted’ is often misused colloquially.” I wrote it because of how the term introverted is often casually used with negative connotations. Many use the term as a synonym of reclusive, and the use of the word in that way felt like a judgment on my own character. The ultimate goal of my article was to change the minds of the readers of the Old Gold & Black; it was an argument, but emotion played an important role in its conception.
Sometimes, I am not writing to convince anyone of anything or to organize my own thoughts. Sometimes, I just write, because it’s fun. I have always enjoyed stories, whether I’m reading a book, watching a movie, or writing my own story. When I write creatively, my work does not have a distinct purpose besides a means of enjoyment. Ever since first grade, when we wrote for a few minutes a day after lunch, I have really liked writing, not just creative writing either. Just about any piece of writing can be a story. Back in that first grade class with Mrs. Rector, while I was writing every day, I would be in a sort of trance within my own head, and it seemed as if my pencil was moving by itself. On one occasion, I did not even notice that writing time had finished; all of my classmates were sitting in a circle on the rug waiting for my teacher to read a story. I was still lost in my thoughts until my teacher broke me out of my trance by sternly calling my name. When I’m writing about something that interests me now, that still happens. When asked why they write, most famous writers would probably give a longer, deeper answer, but it’s true: a large part of why I write is because it’s fun.
Most of the time I only write, because I have to. No one – except for a really dedicated art history student – would actually choose to write about ancient Byzantine architecture from the 5th century, for instance, one of the most painful assignments I’ve ever been assigned. But outside of schoolwork, when I have time to write for myself, I write to explore my thoughts and feelings or other times, like in my opinion articles, I advance an argument that I feel strongly about. The most important, meaningful writing can’t be forced by a teacher. It is written out of necessity on the part of the writer.
Image: www.flickr.com, Creative Commons License
Works Cited
Didion, Joan. “On Keeping a Notebook.” PEN Center USA. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov.
2015.
Didion, Joan. “Why I Write.” Genius. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2015.
Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” George Orwell. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Dec. 2015.