Why Does Anyone Write?

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of their life, every quality of their mind, is written large in their works.                    Virginia Woolf

Writers are frequently asked about why they write? And where do the ideas come from?

Profound, and deeply philosophical writers will give exquisite answers to both questions. See the Virginia Woolf quote above. I’m neither particularly profound nor philosophical so I can only answer from my heart.

You see, I’ve always had a story in my head. When you thought I was sitting quietly staring into space I was constructing a narrative. I had always thought that everyone did this. You see something or someone and immediately you have a plot, a few complications, some rising action, character development and a denouement worked out within minutes of the encounter. I never just caught a bus or went for a walk or swam lengths of the pool…I was inventing a series of scenarios based on the activity in which I was engaged. It made for a very interesting existence but no doubt may have caused some raised eyebrows given the fact that I probably seemed quite disengaged from what everyone else was doing. I’ve said it a number of times that my lovely mum was heard more than once explaining my WLK (weird little kid) behaviour with the line “she writes poetry.” I have never really established if she meant it in a complimentary manner or as a way of deflecting any concerned comments from others.

I also read a lot. And those stories just came alive in my head. The narrative unfolded like a film. I could sense every aspect of the writers’ intentions. I found myself immersed in the narratives so much so that I’m sure I became the 8^th member of the Secret Seven, another sister in Little Women, totally Jane Eyre and eventually one of Agatha Christie’s detectives. And then of course I had the spin-offs (these days possible fan fiction). I ‘wrote on’ when the stories finished. It wasn’t enough for Jane and Mr. Rochester to reunite; I gave them a life beyond the final page. Even beyond their own time and space.

It was the same if I watched a TV program or film. In my head I was somehow part of the story or it gave rise to my own version of it.

But it wasn’t just others’ words and ideas that had me creating. It was every encounter with a friend or stranger, it was watching someone walk in a particular way or the way they dressed or spoke. I had a story for everyone, and everyone had a secret, or a misery or burden that they were dragging with them. I’m not suggesting that the life I gave my living muses were real but sometimes in the expression, or the interaction, if you watched carefully enough, you were given a clue. I’m quite sure the world was unaware of my observations and utterly clueless about how I’d characterised them in my stories. I hope the neighbourhood shopkeeper never knew I had made him a horse thief or the strange lady at number10 was really Eva Braun. Or that my friend’s mother was a fully bona fide witch who would grant one wish to anyone brave enough to ‘out’ her. I’d convinced myself so emphatically that whenever I was near her I’d whisper witch…. just in case.

Nearly every thought had a story attached to it. As a kid all my actions were part of the narrative that was unfolding in my head. Take for example my childhood ‘statue of invisibility’. Whenever I was playing in the front yard or coming back from the shops I ran because my journey was frequently interrupted by the self-imposed need to be invisible if a car or person passed me. I would become a statue and ergo become invisible. In my narrative, invisibility became essential to the mission I had been tasked with. Can’t tell you what the missions might have been, suffice to say it involved saving a whole lot of people from a great deal of trouble. It may have also included the horse thief and Eva. So in essence I couldn’t be sent to the local shop to get milk without a saga unfolding in my imagination.

So why do I write…possibly to prevent my head from exploding! Because surely one small head cannot contain so many ideas before they escape out into the real world. So just to be sure my head doesn’t detonate I let most of them leak out onto the page in the stories and novels I write. They are the product of my imagination, but within, there is always an element of the people, places and events I’ve been observing my whole life.

They who dream by day are cognisant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.                                                              Edgar Allan Poe