Today, while looking through my old files scrounging for potential writing samples, I came across an essay I wrote for my college’s senior writing seminar in early 2015. The prompt for this essay was simply “Why do you write?” I don’t think I’ve ever been able to explain why I write in a more accurate way than this essay, then and since. So, here it is, unabridged and presented without comment.
Why do you write? Is it a question you feel you can answer? Drop a comment below.
When I was in third grade, I wrote a story called “Martin the Mouse,” about a mouse named Martin who gets lost outside while playing in the snow, prompting a mouse-led search party until a human girl befriends him and brings him home. I didn’t have any particular reason or need to write this story. It wasn’t for a school assignment, or written with anyone special in mind. I just got the idea to write it, so I did. It took most of the year to finish, because my progress was very stop-and-go, but I wanted to see it through, and I did. It was the first completed story I ever wrote on my own. And I wrote it because I wanted to.
That wasn’t the point in my life where I decided to write full-time. I didn’t even realize how much I liked writing until fourth grade, when our weekly writing assignments finally gave me an opportunity to be good at something. That was the year I decided I wanted to publish my writing someday. But that was a goal, not a career option. My full-time job would, of course, be that of a sociologist, or politician, or lawyer. Writing wasn’t integral to my future; I did it because I wanted to.
I don’t know why I write. I know that it’s something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, something I’ve always loved doing and always found meaning in, yet I don’t know why I do it. But then, maybe that’s the reason.
When I came to college, I thought the only career option available to me—as an English major—was to teach high school English. I justified the idea: I liked helping people to improve their writing, and teaching seemed to have good benefits. It didn’t take long before I came to two realizations: that I would be miserable working in a high school until retirement, and that writing and wanting to publish was the only desire and passion I’d had throughout my eighteen years that ever remained constant. Ten years post-“Martin the Mouse,” I finally decided: I’m going to study what I love! Fuck job security! I want to write!
But even after that realization, after almost four years of workshops, a love affair with poetry, and improving my craft, after drafts and drafts of SOPs for MFA programs, I still can’t answer the why. My biggest passion is somehow lumped in next to pop music, children’s cartoons, and Old Western aesthetics in the category of “things I love for reasons I don’t understand and can’t explain for the life of me.” It’s not something I’ve ever really thought about. Maybe I thought I’d never need to.
I have never questioned why I write. I have never questioned writing in the first place. And in turn, writing has never questioned me. It does not judge. It does not ignore what I have to say or act like my feelings are invalid. It is my guard in times of vulnerability. It celebrates my emotional highs and lows, rather than criticize them. It allows me to look into the past—memories and drafts alike—so I might better myself and my art, and through it, I grasp a greater understanding of myself. Writing is, essentially, the most reliable friend I’ve ever had. I don’t question that.
And still, I know that writing and words are imperfect. The nature of language itself dictates that words will always fail us; words are not the feelings we want to express, they’re only the closest oral and written semantic tool we have to convey those feelings in the first place. They’re middlemen. Language forces the written word to always have some sort of distance from what the writer actually intended to say. They can never mean quite the same things to different people, and thus they can never be completely, entirely honest. And that assumes that a writer can even properly convey something the way they mean it in the first place; so often, we never come close to clearly saying what we actually mean, because writing itself is a craft built on constant improvement and progress, something that unfortunately can never be perfected. It’s almost a masochistic passion, in that way; it will never truly give us what we’re looking for. But we still do it, because—for some crazy, inexplicable reason—we want to. And doesn’t that mean it at least gives us something?
It has to, I think, because there’s no other explanation for why I would eschew a reliable financial future in preference of writing full-time for the rest of my life.
“Why I write” is an abstraction. I think that might be why I have so much trouble answering the question in the first place. “Why I write” is a combination of factors I understand separately but cannot recognize as a group. In fourth grade I wrote because it gave me something to feel good about, since I didn’t have any other talents. In high school I wrote in an attempt to engage with politics and socioeconomic discord via allegory, perhaps so that I could change people’s minds about something. I write to express love to others (because I feel that if somebody’s worth writing about, they’re worth pursuing), or to channel and cope with my frustration, heartbreak or hatred. I write to process, deal with, and slog through what I’ve experienced. I write as a means of moving forward. I write to force myself to confront ugly truths, and I write to heal. I write because I cannot divorce the identity of writer from my concept of self. I can’t answer the why because there is no single answer. The why has too many answers. The why itself is a lifetime of things worth writing about.
So the closest answer I can come up with, even though I know that words will fail me, is that I write because I want to. Or—perhaps more precisely—I write because I don’t ever want to stop.
Chrissy Montelli 
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