Why I Write Essay- “Why I Write (Still)” Final Draft

I first started thinking about myself as a writer when I was in fourth grade. To be honest, I wasn’t truly thinking of my current self as a writer. Rather, I was dreaming about my future self, a novelist who would have the same meteoric success as my idol J.K Rowling. At age nine, my first attempt at a novel featured a magic school and a naïve young hero, only reaching about a paragraph or so long. As I grew older, my writing became better (presumably) and was centered on arguments for English and History. This didn’t change when I went to college; it just became a more frustrating and demanding process. I churned out paper after paper with the same amount of enjoyment as a printer. During my first year of college, the answer to why I write was too often “because I have to.” Ironically, I started to write for myself again because of a class that I thought would be like all the others. Yet, despite deadlines and grades, English 325: Creative Nonfiction helped me to rediscover my motivation by allowing me to write about what I cared about. Now, I can say “I write because I want to,” with the same excitement I had as a fourth grader. However, I have reasons other than a desire for fame or fortune. I write because it provides the opportunity for me to explore and reflect on my identity, share my passions, and engage with other people.

Before, external pressures pushed me to write and external pressures dictated how I thought of my writing. I wasn’t concerned with creating something I thought was great but creating something my professor would think was great. My opinions on my writing weren’t as important as a grade. Consequentially, when an essay I had labored on for weeks had been demoted to a B+ for no other discernable reason than the professor thought I hadn’t defended Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre enough (she professed a crush on him), I vowed never to take another English class. Still, I had to satisfy my Upper Level Writing Requirement for graduation and I enrolled in one more English class, English 325. I was fully prepared to hate it with a fiery and vocal (outside of class) passion. However, unlike the classes I had taken before, in English 325, I was encouraged to choose my own topic. I could write about what made me passionate, my pet peeves, bad habits, family and heritage, rather than what made my professor passionate. For the first time in a long time, I began thinking like a writer again; even when I wasn’t writing, my thoughts would shape themselves into sentences, into narration, raw material for my next piece of work. Not only that, but I thought of current myself as a writer.  However, I was no longer a fourth grader, and rather than fully accepting my new motivation, I had to question it.

At first, my motivation had all the hallmarks of egoism. After all, writing creative non-fiction was not unlike a game of literary show-and-tell. Best of all, every essay was my turn. However, after reflection, this kind of “egoism” is not the same kind that George Orwell describes a one of the reasons why people write. He equates that version of “egoism” with the “desire to seem clever, to be talked about” (Orwell). My “egoism” was the desire to understand myself, to understand the world as much as I could, and thereby understand my place within it, a predilection with self rather than an obsession. Thoughts, feelings, ideas, these are all abstract and transient. Writing is the attempt to pin them down and make them concrete. This process is a struggle but it is worth it, because it forces me to develop and explain my ideas. Moreover, it challenges me to be brave and declare what I believe. Through my writing, I can delve into how I see the world. I can reflect and search for answers, such as how I fit within the world. For example, my perspective as shown by my writing is often reflective and critical. This attitude informs how I interact with the world and how I see myself. I am someone who thinks and questions, that’s part of my role. My writing helped me discover this about myself.  It provides a process for me to grapple with my ideas. My writing crystallizes my thoughts unto the page, allowing me to better understand, them my views, my world and myself.

I once heard that there are very few people in the world who know who they are and that many of those few are writers; writers have to face reflections of themselves on paper or a computer screen almost every day. This is still true, even if the more inexperienced ones are not adept enough to see themselves in a paper and ink mirror. It’s an inescapable fact that everything I have written and will write, even that miserable Jane Eyre essay and especially that magical paragraph written in fourth grade, reveals my hand in some way, because it is driven by my desires and my quandaries, my quest for understanding.  Sometimes these desires are less than lofty (wanting a good grade or just to be done with Jane Eyre), I admit. However, why I write is inextricably linked to my journey to understand and appreciate the world around me and the world within me.

If writing is all about an exploration of self, if why I write is all about me, why is it that I and many other writes feel compelled to publish work for a public of strangers? I’ll be rude here and answer my own question with a question: Does a piece of art have the same value in someone’s attic that it has in a museum? My knee-jerk reaction is no. Once put out into the world, a piece can gain new meaning by the interpretations of people who view it, and the artist receives a chance to share his or her labors, make them bigger than just his or her efforts. Of course, my fourth-grade labor of love, Annabelle and the Unicorn, should never see the light of day again, and even if it did somehow enter the public sphere, if it received any reaction, it would probably be derision. However, writing still is a medium for connecting with other people. More and more, due to the internet, my writing is not held static within the museum of print but allowed to be fluid and high-speed, where many people can be reached and then can reach back. When people, especially writers, are excited about something, they want to share it; that’s human nature. As much as I enjoy expressing and exploring myself and my ideas through writing, it’s not all about me. My writing is fulfilling and exciting because it allows me to interact with other people as well as my own reflections.

When I was dreaming about what kind of writer I would be, I was much younger and maybe a little less naïve. I did not imagine the writer I am now. Firstly, I have yet to make billions of dollars. Secondly, fourth-grade me was as of yet unfamiliar with extended self reflection and never considered the world might be different from the precepts that seemed to rule “Boy Meets World.” Yet, there was that part of me that was passionate, wanted to share with others, and saw writing as a vehicle.  Over the years, I’ve grown, changed, dropped my pen and picked it up again, and why I write has also undergone changes as well, but perhaps, development is a better term, because I still have my fourth-grade enthusiasm about writing beneath all my “adult” reasons. My motivations have developed into a mixture of my old enthusiasm and my new curiosity, my desire to connect and share and my drive to explore and understand.

Works Cited

Author’s Note

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