I have often wondered what makes people write. I know, I know, there’s a lot of reasons: catharsis, expression, communication, revenge, dollas, whatever. Then there is writing for self and writing for an audience. You may know I have been thinking a lot about Pepys’s Diary in the past few months, in large part because I see parallels between what someone like me does and what Pepys was doing, specifically, relentlessly creating a record of the tedium of everyday life. I wonder how aware he was that his writings would fall into someone else’s hands after his death–was he self-editing at all? Did he go back and reread his old ones and think about his past self and how he felt before, and the mistakes he made? Did he experience the rush at finding that exact day or week that was a pivot point into a really good or really bad patch? Would he have killed for a search box like mine??

I think I have mentioned before I have nightmares if I stop writing all together. I had terrible ones when Strudel was first born in 2005 and I was lurking offline and was reading voraciously but too tired to say anything myself. This is the same when I was younger and painted as well, before I switched to words only. When I was 18 I had an intense dream about NOT painting, since I was slacking off quite a bit in the few months after I had gotten married. I dreamt I was in a waiting room and someone called me, but into the hall. There was row after row of paintings that stretched down a long hall and the woman who took me out there (played by Liz Phair, I am not kidding) said, “This is all the work you haven’t done.” And there they were, all these loud tacky paintings that were in my terrible style from when I was in my late teens and early twenties. DEPRESS. Just like everyone else, my brain is trying to kill me.

I have discovered something about myself in writing online for eight years. I have had breaks in between, which I think is good and necessary (though in one case was court-ordered and lame), during which I write offline. I write offline while blogging as well, when I get the urge. And I have found I still self-edit as if someone is looking over my shoulder. I don’t know if I can actually go to the bottom of my brain and write all the terrible truth from there, whether it is base or just boring. Memoirs–you may be reading them. I don’t have the gumption or self of steam to charge for this.

I see a lot of writing I have done as a shorthand for what I was having deeper thoughts about. Some phrases can send me back and I see the words as hypocritical (either a lie to myself or someone else), as a screen, or as a code that triggers something more complex and detailed. Some writing is a secret message to other people, but even the intended target can’t really experience all the layers to it. A friend of mine says she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about sometimes but enjoys it anyway, which is pretty nice. There’s a lot of levels of enjoyment you can get out of something like writing. Novels I read as a kid are a vastly different experience now–sometimes richer, sometimes shallow and disappointing.

I am getting meta this week because I am on a sort of a vacation and Nothing Hoppon. Another thing I have discovered is that I need a Baby Bear situation. Life cannot be TOO TRAUMATIC nor TOO BORING for me to write often and decently. Right now, life is TOO BORING and I am waiting for things and my brain is trying to slide out of my ears. I can barely read a book.

SO. Why do you write? How do you write? Does your brain try to kill you if you stop creating whatever it is you create?