Not Why I Write

by Susanna · UTC 4/30/2026 · edited UTC 4/30/2026

PersonalWoke

As a first article, I think it would be romantic to talk about why I’m writing at all. It’s a question many have asked, often much time after they’ve started writing. We work backwards, writing before asking why. Similarly, we cry before knowing the hormonal benefits, and we get hungry before we know about calories. In contrast, there are things we don’t do without reason. One does not work a job before knowing they need money, nor do they code before understanding computers. If this is true, then we must do certain things without reason, but simply because we are, by some force, compelled to. Kafka said, “God doesn’t want me to write, but I—I must.” Of course, Kafka was an entirely different type of writer than a teenage girl with a blog, and he wrote about very different things. In fact, I haven’t written about anything at all. I cannot be certain that anything is compelling me to write, nor am I under the illusion that I feel literature the way Kafka did. But all writings do, by some metric, relate to one another. Of course, it is all words and symbols on a page, it is all built in a language that a good share of people must understand, and it all follows certain rules of its genre, either poorly or well. But I would argue the most important characteristic of writing is the thought behind it. Both Kafka and teenage girls with blogs must think before they write.

Thought is the prerequisite to all writing, even bad. For me to have written Harry Potter fanfiction in third grade I must have first thought it, just as Shakespeare must have thought of Romeo and Juliet before he wrote of them. In some way, that does place third grade me on the same court as William himself, though one of us wrote stories that were impactful and thought-provoking, while the other wrote about Romeo and Juliet. Joan Didion says, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Often, her words are misinterpreted as a much simpler claim than they are: that she writes to straighten out her ideas. In fact, what she means to say, or at least what I assume she means to say, is that she wishes to connect with her own mind; to build something out of thoughts and “shimmering images”. She also, within the same essay, asserts that writing is a rather aggressive craft, that no matter how purple, all writing will be an imposition “of the writer’s sensibility…”. Perhaps that permission to bully and to impose is the true appeal of writing. George Orwell, from whom Didion stole the title of “Why I Write,” says,
“What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention…”
Writing may be then, for someone like Orwell, a stalemate between two versions of himself: one that wishes to, as effectively as possible, create change, and one that just as strongly wishes to stop and smell the roses.

Though so many answers exist, I am regrettably not Kafka, nor am I Didion or Orwell, and it is against tradition to define why we write before we write at all, so maybe there is nothing romantic about this topic and instead something rather vain in me asking the question in the first place. So, instead, I would like to ask another, much less intellectual-seeming question. Does it matter why we do anything at all? If the answer to the initial question, why one writes, had been nothing, would writing cease to have value? Comparing Didion’s reason for writing to Orwell’s, hers seems comparatively more selfish, to write for one’s own enlightenment rather than justice. But then, does Orwell too not have a duty to devote himself fully to action separate from the unnecessary frills of literature? Is the creation of all art then selfish? Is everything we do that is not the most efficient way to make the most good selfish? There are no people in the world, then, who do not commit selfish acts, and there is neither a duty to avoid your own fair share. If it is selfish to write, then clearly no one cared much at all, for so many books to have been written. But if there is no moral duty in writing, then what purpose does it serve? I find it difficult to simply accept that there is value in something that is not efficient nor logical. Just as for periods of my life I abandoned the visual arts, I wonder if I must abandon writing. What fat of life may be cut? There are things to cut before writing and art, things like technology and sleep, but does creation not fall onto the chopping block eventually?

This line of thought brought me to my third and final question: must we work towards total efficiency? This type of thinking, the maximization of benefit (profit) and the minimization of wasted time or resources (cost) has taken over our lives. To reach towards maximum efficiency means there must be something we are reaching for, an ultimate human existence, but there exists no perfect human. Do we reach towards a biblical Christ-like purity, where every act is selfless? I do not think so. Christ, too, partook in things not purely utilitarian, he too was not efficient in the way we strive to be. Instead, it seems much more as if we are working towards machine. But there is a strict difference between man and machine, at least so far in our (or their) development, which will not allow us to reach our ultimate evolution. Furthermore, if there was already a way to reach this machine-like perfection, just as no one yet has cared about the selfishness of creation, no one yet has cared about pure selflessness. In a short 16 years of life, the only thing I’ve discovered from this line of thought is that, even if a perfect man/machine could exist, I probably wouldn’t be that. Sadly, I quite enjoy a selfish act now and then, I do love to paint, and I definitely don’t regret writing Harry Potter fanfiction on the school-bus in third grade.

So, I cannot justify writing, especially when I’m not even very good at it, but I can easily excuse it, or else you wouldn’t be reading this sentence right now. My answers are very unsatisfactory. Maybe after ten or one hundred years, I will, like Orwell or Didion, have a beautifully romantic reason for writing, but not right now. I would, however, like to trust that if I continue to write, paint and create, these answers will be revealed to me. For now, I am not a writer at all, as you can tell from the endless errors within this article (though I hope that in the era of AI it comes off endearingly human rather than just stupid), nor have I stopped doing millions of other useless things, so this discussion is much less a question of a feasible lifestyle change and much more a faraway, unapplicable thought exercise about the value of writing. Still, I do not see the perfect world as one rid of creation, so I do not think we must stop creating before achieving a perfect world, either. Whether selfish or selfless, man or machine, maybe something compels us towards creation in a way we cannot understand before creating all that we wish to. If the end goal is to do the most good possible, can we not assign goodness to the very action of creation? The written work can therefore justify its own writing, and we can create a convoluted appeal as to why we forgive ourselves for stopping and smelling the roses.

Alternatively, we can take the rather radical approach of not really thinking so hard about it and kind of just doing whatever we want, which will bring about the same result and much less anguish. (Perhaps more utilitarian?)