Why I Write: The Unvarnished Truth

How writing permanently reconfigures the past (and is therefore so healing) + an effective way to divide up the “mornings & afternoons” of writing + an immersive new course on writing the body

Blue felt rug (mosen) (18th-19th century) tie-dyeing wool. From the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Anais Nin said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” A lovely sentiment, except that many times, I find that I—and many of my students—need to write about experiences we’d never want to taste once, let alone twice.

Why write, then?

I know I am supposed to say that I write because I have to write. We are told this is what makes a writer a writer: that she has no other choice. But, even though writing has most certainly saved my life, I don’t really believe that I write because I have to write. I can’t believe that, considering that my entire writing philosophy and teaching practice is built, increasingly, on the idea that our writing’s power to transform us (and others) rests at least in part on how intentional we are on the page, how “on purpose” we are about the work we create. To do something on purpose is not the same thing as a compulsion. Writing is a choice for me. A choice I make again and again (yes, often compulsively and with great urgency).

But, still, a choice. So, why?

For me, the answer lies in quantum theory. When I write, I rewire my relationship to the past, and, in so doing, I change the past itself. Quantum mechanics has a theory for this, called the observer theory: “The observer effect is the fact that observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes it. Observer effects are especially prominent in physics where observation and uncertainty are fundamental aspects of modern quantum mechanics.”

This means that when we observe our own experience up close and with a tremendous, greedy, slurping kind of thirst, we alter it permanently. We rebuild it forever. This is so empowering! And this effect is certainly a big part of why I write.

Writing gives me the chance not only to spin gold from straw—that’s always true of any decent use of workaday words, after all. But writing is so much more than that. Writing allows me to conjure moments of glory from abject terror. In this way, writing is wholly alchemical. In this way, writing is magic. Writing is abracadabra: As I speak, so I create.

Andre Aciman, in his brilliant essay “How Memoirists Mold the Truth,” said that writing “not only plays fast and loose with the past; it hijacks the past. Which may be why we put the past to paper. We want it hijacked.” He went on to explain:

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons… provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction. It’s their revenge against facts that won’t go away.

Writing alters, reshuffles, intrudes on everything. As small a thing as a shifty adverb, or an adjective with attitude, or just a trivial little comma is enough to reconfigure the past.

And maybe this is why we write. We want a second chance, we want the other version of our life, the one that thrills us, the one that happened to the people we really are, not to those we just happened to be once.

Yes! To all of this! I have read and reread Andre’s essay so many times; I even used a quote from it—there is no past; there are just versions of the past—as the epigraph in The Part That Burns.

But here is an important distinction I’d like to add: I find it very difficult to talk about writing without talking about revising. The two processes are so interconnected, so symbiotic, and so necessarily distinct from one another. Writing is a Wild West, a messy tableau of finger paint and Play-Doh, glitter and glue. Writing is an unexplored frontier, a carnival, a funhouse of broken springs and trick doors where virtually anything can happen. Writing is a back alley, an abandoned building, an unlit parking garage. It’s a little scary, to be honest, to be so uncontrolled. Writing is a trip, because it’s generative and uncharted and full of risk. It can be fun, and it can be scary, but most of all, it must always be new. Elizabeth Strout, who divides her writing day into morning and afternoon, does her most generative and creative work of imagining new characters and scenarios in the morning, so, thanks to her, I think of my own generative phase of writing as “the morning of writing,” no matter the time of day when I engage with it (and to be honest, for me, it’s usually at night, not just because I work full time, but also because I am a hardwired night owl).

Revising, on the other hand, is hard physical labor. Revising is not editing! Decidedly not editing—but rather so much more than editing. Revising is to editing what a total remodel and addition to your home is to a repainting the foyer. Revising is taking the pile of clay that emerged during the morning of writing and squeezing it, pushing it, pulling it, pressing your palms into it, until you know what it might be made of, and what it might become. Revising is literally seeing your work again, seeing it anew. Brand new. Then making it into something another person could read and experience as transformative. Something that another person might lose themself in, weep over, gasp at, sit in silent prayer after. This is the work of revision. Revision is where we labor over imagery and word choice, musicality and sentence structure, architecture and grammar, and the intersection of these choices with meaning, which is always the point. What, in the end, does it mean? Revision can leave us spent and sore, yes, but it also leaves us fundamentally changed. Revision is what “reconfigures the past,” as Aciman says—and in so doing, it reconfigures us. Revising is, for me, the “afternoon of writing,” no matter what time of day I actually do it, because afternoons are when Elizabeth Strout forces herself to figure out what her stories are actually about, and how the characters and scenarios she dreamed up in the morning relate to one another to form a cohesive story.

Ultimately, whether we are aware of the process or not, we are narrative beings, and make sense of ourselves and our lives through a constantly emerging narrative. And the major plot points of that narrative shape both who we are and who we will become. So, how we arrange and rearrange those plot points not only gives us agency, it changes everything, including us.

And this… this is why I write.

I would love to know why you write! Please share in the comments if you wish; it would be lovely to make a big beautiful collage of our reasons for joining together in this spectacular endeavor.