By: Jannelle

We as humans have evolved an advanced form of communication, writing. A complex conversion of shapes representing noises that we make as air passes over our vocal cords in various stages of flexion, and the ideas that those sounds pair with meanings within out language in the form of words. These words represent a range of ideas from quite simplistic to the very intricate meanings of the existentialism of life and beyond.

Writing allows us to put those words down on a page and then through those words pass those thoughts and ideas that we have on to others, be it your classmate next to you with a simple note, or the epiphanies of a scholar that lived long before you.

As writers we long to transform these words into better sentences that convey ideas more accurately with their most pure meanings as well as build intrigue and awe with the way language sounds and feels both out loud and within our own minds. Taking a step past the communication of ideas and crafting the medium into a form that invokes feelings deep within our readers.

We create worlds and entire universes with our words. Writers take from the world around them, the one based in reality, and they combine those things with some internal twisting to make new ideas and concepts that have never been said or done before.

At the very least we strive to say what has been said before with new light, in a sort of reinvention of the wheel mentality.

This opens up these fresh worlds to ourselves and others. Some writers may just even do so to hold onto a special place that they have complete and total control over. For many however, writing causes us to look for ways to articulate these special worlds to others.

Thus we write to produce our best ideas in their best possible form for others to consume.

In doing so we may grow immortal through the way our words live on within the pages and publications that we create. We may seek to shape a build up the people who read our works and transcend into them our knowledge and wisdom long after we are gone from this earth.

“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”

Ray Bradbury

Others may write for these reasons, as well as to share the stories that consume them. To free themselves of the burdensome earworms that bore into them and wake them in the night and hold their attention captive in the waking of day. Spilling those thoughts out to release their minds of what must be told.

They write because they have to, for many there is no other option, no world in which they are themselves and do not write. There is also the added attachment many writers gain in the shaping of these thoughts into their best form, a sense of obligation you might say. Such as what a parent might feel towards their children, the desire to make them all they can be and give them the best chance at being successful out in the world.

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driver on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

George Orwell

All in all there are many reasons why we write, but what is most important is that we do. That we do write our stories and ideas for the current and future generations to learn form and build upon. To warn others of our own mistakes and to even develop and teach ourselves of the world around us as we contemplate how to improve our own words and the worlds those words create.

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The following are notes from when I started planning out my blog and writing career well over a year ago. (and yes it did take me that long to work myself into a state that was reasonable enough to share with others)

Younger me was commenting on a first draft of this post that I had written a least six months before that. So I say all of this to say, don’t let others or the circumstances around you hold you back, cause they will and in the end starting is hard but it is also essential. Because you can study and learn and improve yourself, but if you never start on the actual thing you are doing all those things for, then what was all of it for in the first place.

Updated Notes: 3/15/17

This post is supposed to be about why we as writers must write. That inner driving force that brings us to the edge of sanity, but in its process opens up our minds, and souls, to the ways and thinking of the world, and the worlds we build.