Why I Write

The other day, my writer friend (who inspires me to be more lyrical in my writing, something I seem to lack), told me “I’ll never know why it is you want to write so much”. This is after I went on a rant telling him I thought I was losing my talent, losing the one thing that meant the most to me. Sure, I can write about myself for ages, but I mean fiction writing – getting out of my own selfishness and imagining a world that no one has created before. I was genuinely afraid that I was losing it. This is what I told him: 

“I want to change someone’s life for those few moments. Make them cry, make them laugh, make them think. I want them to finish it and wish it never ended. I want to make them discuss it with others afterward.” 

 

All writers out there probably have this motive: they want to affect someone’s life and be remembered. That is only the beginning of it, the surface. But a table isn’t just a surface. If someone cut a table in half, there is so much more to it than something that is flat. There are beautiful patterns. There is art. I write to affect someone, to be remembered. But the reason I write most is so someone can leave this earth for a few hours, maybe even days, or even just a few minutes. So they can picture themselves in another place, far from anything they’ve ever experienced. To forget about what is happening in their lives, the drama or worries they are facing, and to just read my words and feel them. This is the art that comes alive when you cut a table in half.


Reading is such a beautiful action. It differs from watching a movie. You have so much more power when you read. You get to choose what the characters look like, you get to choose what the location looks like, you get to choose what you are feeling. It doesn’t sway you in any way as movies mostly do. You are the one deciding. I want to write because I want one person to think the main character was a hero, another to have a deep hatred for him. All of these feelings that you get when reading is because of this one thing – words. Words are the reason for all of this emotion, not images or sound. Just words. The words explain what the scene sounds like, what it looks like, what the characters are doing – but you get to interpret it any way you want.

The first novel that really sparked my interest in writing was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I was in my senior year of high school and we all had to pick a novel for our big research paper. We were allowed to pick novels we have already read in other classes or we could pick our own, with approval of course. Most chose the easy way out, choosing To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (all amazing novels that are very complex, but already have been discussed in detail with teachers’ lesson plans). But I wanted to pick something different. I remember my teacher saying it was a great choice, shocked that I chose such a difficult piece. I started the novel and I’m not exaggerating – my jaw dropped. Her words were beautifully put. One of the simplest lines but one that resonated with me was after all of these years was when the mother passed: “that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished, and the sound of a voice so familiar, and dear to the ear, can be hushed, never more to be heard”.  I remember asking my mother and sister to just listen to this sentence because of how much it affected me.


I will fight for the rest of my life to be a part of this group of people. Not just writers, because anyone can write just like how anyone can sing. But the ones that make a difference in someone’s life, the ones who get fan mail that say thank you, you were there for me when no one else was or you understood me or even just how great the novel was and that they will never forget it, that they will recommend it and hand it over to a loved one because they don’t want it to end in their hands. I want a young seventeen-year-old girl to be reading and have her jaw drop just like mine did with Shelley’s masterpiece. If I keep this in the front of my mind rather than the back, I will eventually get that next greatest American novel in a publisher’s hand. And I truly believe this can happen. All I need is an idea.


By: Kristin Jane Smith