Why Writers Write

By Matthew Manera

In Chapter X of Winnie-the-Pooh, “In Which Christopher Robin Gives Pooh a Party, and We Say Good-bye,” Pooh is presented with a Special Pencil Case containing assorted pencils, a rubber eraser, and a ruler. Eeyore, on inspecting Pooh’s gift, opines, “This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.” Of course, Pooh and Christopher Robin and AA Milne, himself, would disagree. But what is in this writing business?

Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” “Why does one begin to write?” asks Nicole Krauss. “Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak,” she answers.

When I taught first-year English in university, I would give my students a free-writing exercise. The rules were very simple: there were no rules. I would give them a phrase or an idea with which to begin, at which point they would start writing and not stop until I told them to – usually around ten or fifteen minutes. They were to keep the hand moving across the page without pausing, without concerning themselves with spelling or punctuation or grammar, without worrying about going off on tangents, without going back and revising what they had already written.

In this way, they would prove to themselves that there are things we have to say that can come out only through that deliberate, unstuttered motion of the writing hand, through the inscribing of ink on the page, there are ideas that simply will not present themselves through the medium of silent contemplation or, as Nicole Krauss said, through simple speaking. The other thing most of my students agreed upon was that they didn’t want to stop when I said time was up; they had so much more to say. They were beginning to explore their own mental landscapes; they were learning, as Flannery O’Connor said, what it was they thought about things. These thoughts were always there, waiting for release; they just needed to be coaxed into the light by the moving hand.

But not only do we write to figure out what we already know in some part of our mental landscape, we write to invent. As Anaïs Nin says, “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”