Why Write?

I  write because I very much need it, to escape the mundane. I could instead have taken up pottery or channel  swimming, I used to be a good swimmer! But there used to be characters in my head wanting their voices and conversations to be heard, their stories to be out here, somewhere. It seemed to be my responsibility to let them out. There were days when I felt detached from reality, going through the motions during the day, impatient to get to the evening when I could just sit down and write down what I needed to write.

Some nights, I’d write till 2 or 3 at night, even though I had to get up at seven to get the day started, kids off to school, watch husband drive off to his job, get some laundry on etc. before going to work myself.

Those days I’d walk along the road talking to myself like a loony, the dialogue for the scenes in my head tumbled out. Writing was at times obsessional. But when I could just sit and the words ran away with me, the feeling was almost miraculous, it filled me with delight.

Later I began writing plays, taking my ability to write dialogue to its logical conclusion. That was a different kind of joy, it required far more concentration on the technical aspects because with playwrighting you don’t need too many long speeches, exposition is the theatrical equivalent of the info-dump. However unless you’re Samuel Becket some information is needed for plot development, has to be incorporated into the dialogue.

Now I write because I want to but very seldom because I have to. I can’t write in that first intense way and recapture that joy I used to have, because storytelling doesn’t work in the same way for me.  When I first realised I could no longer do that I was very upset, became convinced that I’d lost my imagination. It took me a long while to try again and joining a small, local writers' group has been immensely helpful in encouraging me. I can still get engrossed and write for fun, for personal record keeping which I do quite a lot, and I write for my blog, which has a small audience and that’s gratifying.

So my fiction writing is for pleasure and with the hope of publication. My poetry when I do occasionally write a poem is to catch the intensity of a moment, epic poetry is beyond me.

And I want to write more plays, I think for the technical challenge as well as for the magic of seeing my work onstage again, with clever actors bringing my words to life. That’s where I think the joy could be for me now.