WHY DO WRITERS WRITE?
Tolstoy answered this question in a passage worth reading over and over:
The aims of art are not to resolve a question irrefutably, but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations. And these are inexhaustible. If I were told that I could write a novel in which I could indisputably establish as true my point of view on all social questions, I would not dedicate two hours to such a work; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years from now by those who are children today, and that they would weep and laugh over it, and fall in love with the life in it, then I would dedicate all my existence and all my powers to it.
Perhaps the chief motive for a writer/artist is to intensify the sense of being alive and loving life.
Another is by continually dealing with beauty to stay young and excited till we die.
Another is by creating a work of art to somehow become one.
Another is to get inside the minds of other people and experiment with personalities and lives not our own.
Another, according to Anaïs Nin, is, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
Another is that a novel is like a play in which we silently take all the parts and thus enrich our self or our many selves – Scott Fitzgerald used to say, “Writers aren’t exactly people; they’re a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”
Another is to attract attention, though slipshod writers give the impression this is the last thing on their minds.
Another is, according to Noel Coward, that it’s good to have work that is more fun than fun.
Another is, yes, that most of us do prefer talking to ourselves without interruptions.
Another is that by writing we discover who we are and what we think. Thackeray said, “There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.”
A counter-reason was given by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”
My guess is, given the chance of another life, most writers would again choose to be writers. That’s how good it is. In what other job can you sit in a chair and conjure up more worlds than Marco Polo or Columbus ever saw? In dreams, we’re all space-walkers. As George Santayana put it: “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
In one of his brighter moods, Flaubert wrote:
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.