Why Bother Writing?

That's a question every writer needs to ask. For some - not very many, I suspect - writing is simply a way to make a living. For most it is an inexplicable urge that keeps them going against all odds. For me it's a vocation. There are several aspects to this question I am going to look into, beginning with two: writing as self exploration; writing as an essential and unique artistic form.

Writing as Self-Exploration - Varied as my subjects and settings are, it seems to me at times that I'm writing or revising the same story over and over. I can't let readers feel that way of course. But what I'm getting at is me, the novelist, as the locus of all my creative activity. As much as my stories are written with an audience in mind, each and every one of them is a self exploration too. A recurring theme for me is Love: how it flows like an electric current through the living universe; and hate, how it is a force that is ultimately nihilistic and utterly self limiting. That theme runs through all my stories. In fact, the stories are explorations of that theme, uncovering deeper and more powerful expressions of Love as the nurturing force of life.

Writing as an Essential and Unique Artistic Form - We are occasionally asked to contemplate the doomsday scenario for literature. It goes something like this: In a world of big screen movies, video games, the internet and so on, a bunch of chicken scratch on a page just can't keep up. Why would people - especially young people, who have never been committed to words in print - bother plodding through a book when they can have it delivered to them as an interactive, wrap-around, thunderous sensory experience?

Response (the most important of many): It is precisely because they must be read that books are such a wonderful artistic medium. The reader creates his or her own story from the pages of a book - it's a creative process. That shared creativity makes books very special. No other medium allows so much scope for its audience members to feel they have created something.

It's an infinitely flexible space, too. Anything the human mind can imagine can be written about. The shared, overlapping universes of literature offer degrees of subtlety and complexity no other medium can dupicate.

Is literature immune from its changing social and technological contexts? Of course not. My guess is literature will become more of a niche among many other forms of artistic expression. But it will always be an important niche... and the one I choose to work in.