Why do I write?

Why do I find myself pouring letters onto a blank slate and coating it in the words that I feel exist to fill that emptiness?

Maybe it is because I have so much to say. I am constantly bursting at the seams, words pushing against their boundary with a powerful need to escape and be heard, be seen.

Maybe I write because I have a desire to be heard; because I have a desire to share something important. All of the suppressed opinions and stories and thoughts remain locked inside of me with nowhere to go, no outlet to escape to. Until finally, I unlock them, and they fall to freedom on a blank page.

Maybe I write because I remain so fearful of the erosion of my memories as time continues on, so fearful that soon a gust of wind will blow away the eroded stories of my mind, and they will be left untold. I will be left with nothing to say of my life.

Maybe I write just because I can, because whenever I find myself in front of a blank screen or blank sheet of paper, the words begin to stir up inside of me, boiling to the surface. And eventually, the words begin to flow out through the tips of my fingers and fill up pages and pages until I am done telling the story I had begun.

Maybe there is no reason why I find myself writing. Perhaps the desire to write spurred out of nothing, no explanation, and simply just exists.

And maybe, I write because all of these things; maybe I don’t have the simple explanation or understanding of where this coercing force to write comes from. Possibly, every element of my life led up to me finding comfort in words and the starving appetite to express them.

I wouldn’t even say that I always write because I have the need to tell a certain story; sometimes the story forms itself. I find myself beginning a page with one sentence, and then the rest of the words finding each other and connecting. A story spurs not out of my mind, but out of the paper and all I do is simply place the words together as they tell the tale they have obscured within them.

Writing usually isn’t even something you want it to be. I have all of these words inside of my head, yet more than not, I am unable to release them in the way I want to, or even at all. My best stories I have to tell usually remain kidnapped by my mind, disabling me from finding them and letting them flood like a hurricane onto uncharted blank screens.

Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that writing is something that cannot be forced. A truly good piece of writing cannot be unwillingly pulled out of nothingness and thrown onto a piece of paper. A truly good piece of writing writes itself; it comes from a sudden inspiration that absolutely cannot go unwritten, an inspiration that pulls a writer to a piece of paper or a blank screen and begs to be released onto it.

Sure, a forced work can seem to be something magnificent, but that is just based on one’s ability to simply toss words together in a brilliantly figurative way. That makes the process easy, being able to just mix those words together, but in its bareness, writing is not easy. It shouldn’t be.

So, that brings me back to the question of why I write. Why would I voluntarily do something that is challenging?

Maybe that is part of the pull to write. Maybe the challenge is what pulls one to a piece of paper to sit and share a series of letters forming words forming someone’s story they want to tell. And maybe, some people just write because they have to.

For me, writing isn’t something I completely understand. I don’t have a specific reason why I like it or why I constantly find myself feeling empty without it. I don’t have an explanation for that magnetic pull I feel to a piece of paper, and an explanation for how easily I lose myself in my own words.

Honestly, I don’t know why I write, but I also don’t know why I wouldn’t.