Even More Conversation about How and Why Writers Write . . .

So far, this conversation had posts on July 18th, 20th, 23rd, and 25th. 

And, our discussion can continue today because the post on the 25th had a comment from an author in Germany, on the “Why” of writing:

“A Why –
“Now that is difficult. Why, for example, do I write instead of painting?
“When I was younger I painted a lot, so why have I taken to writing? There was a phase from my late childhood to my early teens when I worked on what I called “serials”. I think the idea came from watching serialized fiction on TV. For every ‘serial’ I invented a family and told their story over several decades, in one case centuries. On the top of the paper I wrote what happened in the year, then I painted a picture. It took a lot of research to find out what happened in the year I wanted to paint, what kind of clothes people were wearing, and I had to think about the people I had introduced and what should happen to them.
“A finished ‘serial’ comprised between twenty and several hundred pictures. So maybe I turned to writing because I can tell my stories in a more economic way using only language.”

It’s interesting to me that this author evolved from serialized, captioned images to telling her stories with only language…

This happened to be the 7th comment in our full conversation and each one was a totally Unique word-image of either the How or the Why of writers writing.

To me, it could be no other way, unless there’d been a series of writers from the most modern clique of genre-copycats.

Assuming we all have a unique soul (whether or not our personality is socially constrained), our creativity must be potentially just as unique.

But, consider the authors you may have read and admired for their creativity, then discovered their private lives were nothing you’d care to embrace…

So, some writers live their creativity, some create in spite of social encumbrances; and, the rest swim in the ocean of conformity.

Also, the ready availability of the means to produce a book by oneself seems to have let the conformists clog the streams of publishing.

But, I’m curious what some of you may have experienced…

I sit here in my basement apartment, scan articles on the Internet, read my books, and publish this blog—certainly not an expert on what’s actually going on in the publishing/reading world.

In fact, from my nearly constant scanning of the Internet, it appears there isn’t really much of a comprehensive view of the ratios of those three types of writers I mentioned—living their creativity, creating in spite of, and embracing conformity…

What’s your experience of the current book-world?

Plenty of brilliantly creative authors?

Some of those; but, a lot of socially-wounded writers?

Very few of either the “living their creativity” or “creating in spite of” writers and a swarm of genre-conformists?

But, of course, we still have a rich heritage of authors from many stages in humanity’s evolution—many streams feeding our ocean of books…

And, let’s not consider only fiction—there are those three “flavors” of authors writing non-fiction, too.

Perhaps I’ve given some of you something to ponder…

Perhaps some of you will be able to express what you’re pondering in a comment :-)

{EDIT} This comment arrived after we’d gone on to another conversation—It comes from “Late Night Girl”

Why:
– I write to cope. I always wrote, even when my life was “normal” (whatever that is!) from teenage years on, clumsy, lots of silly useless things, but I always wrote. But my writing went traumatic and wrong for a while in the last 3 years. Long story….
– I also write to raise awareness, out my experience with workplace bullying and the huge misunderstanding of what (true) leadership actually means and the result of this “misunderstanding” being the abuse of power, which is so prevalent in today’s employment worldwide, especially with large multi-national and billion pound companies, where money incentives turns people into raging bullies. (Sorry, I am German where we do long sentences, keeping sentences short and placing the commas at the right spots is not my strength).
– And then I write because it is plain fun!

How:
I don’t know, I just write as it comes. I don’t know anything about rules or Haikus or Sonnets, I just have a bunch of letters in front of me and my fingers start to dance on them.
I kind of live by one rule, like the Robin William character in “Dead Poet’s Society” instructing his students to rip out a certain page of their lecture book, and start thinking and writing for themselves. That’s the rule I write by.

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