why I write

I was watching some videos by Brandon Sanderson on writing. Particularly the Ten Things I Wish I’d Known as a Teen Author video from 2020. At some point he makes an off handed comment about writing not needing to be a career choice. You can write for so many reasons!

A question bubbled up in my head.

Why do I want to write?

And I realized I didn’t actually have the answer to that. Nor had I ever really sat down and thought about why I do the other things I do. Why I draw, why I code, why I make music.

Let’s go through them from the ones I think are the easiest to answer, to the most difficult one: writing.

Why I draw

I genuinely enjoy seeing the characters and pieces of myself come to life when I draw. I like visualizing things, I like being able to share these visualizations with other people.

It’s also a great thing to do idly. Doodling in the corners of my notebooks to the great dismay of my teachers. I actually struggled to pay attention to my teachers if I didn’t doodle during class. It was a way to keep my hands busy.

I draw for other people because I like seeing their characters come to life, too.

Why I make music

Similar to art, because I can give people a “visualization” of the characters in my head. It’s not one-to-one, but giving people a feeling, an emotion, a rhythm of these characters… complements my visual art in a way visual art can’t achieve. I like making character theme songs first and foremost, it’s why I got into music.

Why I code

This one’s actually different. I like making tools for people.

Most of my code work is me writing something I know I would find useful. But the real drive that keeps me going is when other people also find it useful. The PK Dashboard sprouted from my own needs, but became something bigger through other people using it and enjoying it too.

If I ever were to go into tech as a job, I would like to make assistive technology. Tech that helps people’s lives in some way, shape or form.

Why I Write

I still don’t know the answer to this so this might be a bit incoherent, sorry in advance.

Let’s start with something simple, why am I writing this. This article. I think it’s to get the thoughts out of my head? But also to share it with other people, similar to the coding. I’m hoping someone else can get something out of it here.

But fiction writing… why do I want to write fiction? It’s not to share my characters for once, as I have no interest in writing my characters’ existing stories. It’s not to help other people either.

My Roots

I have this grandiose idea of becoming a published fiction author, but how will I get there if I don’t even know what I’m writing for? It’s strange, I think I lost the plot somewhere during highschool. Prior to thlol heb jij wel eens dieat period of my life I wrote a lot. I can barely remember that time of my life, either.

I think I have a theory, though. It was my way of processing what was happening around me, and within me.

Early on, I would write about things I had recently learnt in class. I would write to incorporate fun facts I picked up from a random encyclopedia. I would write to make sense of this new forum I stumbled across on the internet.

My fictional stories later evolved into me writing about magic systems I had developed. Or I would write a new story as an excuse to use this one cool character name I’d come up with on the spot. Of course, I was like 11 years old. That cool name really wasn’t all that cool.

That explains why I’ve never been much of a planner. If writing is a way to process my surroundings (and myself), planning would undermine that. It would not let me work out my issues that way. And maybe that’s okay?

Pruning the offshoots

My roots are still there. I can tell because, again, I’m writing this very article. I’m once again writing to process what is going on in my head, just in a very direct manner.

I feel like I’ve strayed off the path here. I got too enveloped in the idea that I needed to write to tell a great story. To teach others the things that I’ve learnt. To make others feel emotions that they could not experience otherwise. To make a great experience for other people.

Yet my best work so far remains a story I wrote at 14 years old. It was an assignment from my native language class (dutch). The entire class had to write a short story about literally whatever they pleased.

After my teacher had graded all the assignments, she pulled me aside. She told me I was the only one who got perfect marks, because I was the only one who wrote a story so compelling she could not put it down. Even though she saw the plot twist coming from a mile away, she still wanted to experience it.

That story was very much about my own mental state at the time. It wasn’t directly me, but it was a metaphor for my own plurality that became very obvious to me a couple years later.

And if that worked, why am I so bothered about trying to make the best experience for someone else, rather than giving expression to my own thoughts and struggles?

Why am I suddenly above writing a silly 5-page story because I discovered a chat functionality in my nintendo DSi, and I thought making a chatlog story would be funny?

So, why do I write?

It’s the way I process and understand information. Whether that be a silly little blog post where I work this exact thing out, or it’s a short psychological horror about your mind being directly influenced by someone else who doesn’t belong there, or it’s a silly chatlog story because I found out pictochat existed.

I write because it’s the way I learn.