“Why do you write?”
This question was posed to me during the fall semester in a creative writing class that I took at my university. I believe this is an incredibly important question for any writer to ask, and I wanted to share my response with you.
Why I Write
I have often questioned if writing is a gift bestowed on those who most struggle with the notion of death, those who fear mortality not for the uncertainty of where the soul will pass through, but for the shape of the world upon its departure. I write because I have been given the gift to do so, but why? Why has this talent run its course from my mind to the hands that form these very words? Why did God choose me to be a receiver of experiences and giver of words that capture these experiences in the most profound way?
Upon my first reading of “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” I felt empowered in knowing that I am not alone in my desperation to have my voice be heard. In the nineteenth century John Keats sat down and recorded his fears of failing to achieve greatness as a poet. He longed for fame and feared that death would come before he would have the chance to seal his legacy on paper. Now, in the twenty-first century, I face these same fears. How peculiar it is that the thinking patterns of humanity have changed so much without really having evolved at all. Keats wrote with his own hand, F. Scott Fitzgerald did it with a typewriter, and I sit here now using a laptop, and yet all our words explore the same universal human emotions. And so as a writer, I become a link between today and yesterday, and I hope, the next generation of writers will discover my words and become the link between the future and today.
I carry around with me a print copy of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is with me when I am driving, when I am in the company of friends, and is even close by as I sleep—it serves as a reminder of my deep passion for written words and why I have dedicated my life to organizing them in a fashion that is both original and memorable. It also reminds me of the tension Keats faced as he was torn between the world of the imagination and that of reality. Though it was typical of the Romantic poets to devote their thinking to the visionary capabilities of the human mind, and seen by others as a denial of reality, I write because I can see the imagination as much more than that. Where early scholars would have argued that imaginative writing is reflective of a writer who has turned away from the world, I write with the hopes of proving that it is just the opposite—imagination is a gift, utilizing it is a talent, and why would the human mind possess this capability if not for its promise to help us better understand the world and our role within it?
I once had an elderly woman ask me if I liked to paint. After a brief discussion of the different mediums we preferred to use, she pulled a porcelain plate off a shelf and handed it to me. I traced my fingers along the intricate design of rose petals that her own hand had created, simply using a paintbrush and her imagination. As I admired it, she tapped her finger against the plate and said the words I have not forgotten, “You know, I lost my daughter at a very young age, and this…this is the only thing that helped me survive it.” It was those simple words that I recollected upon reading Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” As Keats stated, “When old age shall this generation waste, /Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe.” And so I write, because, as for the woman who channeled her sorrow into beauty by painting porcelain, it is a form a therapy that allows me to confront the aspects of life that are not easily explained. Furthermore, I write because like the Grecian urn, like the porcelain plate with the rose petals, though my human life may be fleeting, there is hope that my voice can still be admired even after it can no longer be heard. Writing is an art form, and any true writer harvests secret dreams of jumping high and landing among classic literary figures just as painters fantasize about having their work hung in the halls of the Louvre.
It was the dream of John Keats to be remembered as a poet, and I carry his ode around with me to fulfill his dream, a fellow writer. His words are a reflection of my own fears, a burden in my pocket as I take them with me wherever I go, and yet I confront these truths because I know how much it would mean to him that a few hundred years after he first poured his heart out into his poetry, I have taken an active role in ensuring his legacy still lives on. Maybe one day someone, somewhere, will do the same for me.
And now I pose this question to you, my fellow writers. Why do you write?
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