Writers - Why?

Good questions in Impulses, Sources, Trajectories: Douglas Unger on Discovering Why You Write (Lit Hub)

Self-discovery is one of the essential rites of passage toward maturity and later mastery for writers. Part of this artistic self-knowledge can be achieved by developing self-awareness through self-appraisal of one’s origins, impulses and sources necessary to answer the most basic artistic questions: What kind of writer do I want to be? Where does my writing come from? Why am I writing?

Once a writer can articulate some answers (and these answers will change over time, with life events, and with artistic failure or success), only then can the writer best determine the trajectories of stories, novels, essays, and of a literary career. Discovering one’s impulses and sources (artistic self-knowledge) is essential for answering these questions. Jean Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (translated by Bernard Frechtman) poses similar inquiries. Sartre writes of “a pact between freedoms” and of the writer as making an “appeal” to a reader to engage in this pact as a mutual striving for freedom. His answers to the question why write? are inspiring. We can hear in them, too, some of the relief and ebullience in his reaffirmations of humane values after the defeat of Nazism and its horrors in World War II (also, one can hear an echo of the call to the barricades during the French Revolution). For Sartre, creative sources must be political. When we write, he states, we “bear the responsibility for the universe.” (p. 55).  As grandly overwhelming as this statement is, this motive, which Sartre asserts should also appeal for change, can help reveal our sources.

Still―how can we know? How do we arrive at this self-knowledge of our sources?

Self-examination is required, much of it specific to the story or novel in the process of the writing: What is its impulse? What is its trajectory? Where does it want to go? And why?

I write this blog to give me a place to think things out - obviously politics, but writing itself.  It is also the place where I can put the journals I kept for the past 15 years. There are people deserving an explanation for things I have done.

 I also mean to share here what I am reading and thinking about. The hope is that someone who wants to be a writer will learn from my mistakes.

The journals, hopefully, will keep alive some of the people I met over the past 15 years. 

But the fiction? Some of it is to keep alive stories from my past and people I once knew. Some of it is therapy. And some of it is both. I want to tell the stories of where I am from in a form that captures life here, and some of it is just for fun, to amuse me with telling the story. I do not have a style, for I came back to fiction too late to acquire a style.

Mr. Unger goes into different concepts of the writer. These are worth reading, for I found ideas here not seen before. Since I do not have a style, I have not tried to write sentences for their beauty. Perhaps there is time for that. Maybe the best thing is to try and combine the best sentences with the best story.

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