Why do I write?

I was recently asked to deliberate on the question, "Why do I act?", alongside "What do actors do and why do they act?" After sitting through a very long and cathartic discussion of these ponderables and having a week to re-think them through, the next inevitable question became, "Why do I write?"

For those who've seen this post of mine from awhile back, yes, I do realise the irony of asking myself why I write. Because the most obvious answer is, "Because I can," and this is probably the deepest truth in why I seek pen and keyboard to weave words with.

I know I don't write because I've too much to say. Well, I do have too much to say, just that it's not why I write. Maybe it's the thrill of taking unoriginal words, used by millions of people through the ages, and putting them together in an original way - the act of creating something unique, and hopefully beautiful. I like looking at something I'm happy having written and thinking, "I like what I just wrote." And for the lemons that I sometimes churn out, I put them aside, look back on them some time later and, after the initial gagging, decide what it was that didn't work for them.

While putting words together (in English, of course) comes easily enough to me, I'm not the most original of people when it comes to thinking of what to write about. Hence, most of my life, I've been frustrated by not having anything to say but having the means to say it. It's like having a hammer and a trigger-happy arm but not a piece of wood in sight.

I think that's what many wannabe writers struggle with, and I've come to realise it takes a conscious effort to find something worth writing about. Blogging doesn't always count, since it sometimes turns out to be a medium for verbal diarrhoea, or just saying what you have no one to say to. One has to go out there with a mission in mind to discover something you can wrap your words around.

Language is a strange thing. A picture paints a thousand words, as the adage goes, but a thousand words paint a thousand pictures - every person who reads the same thing has a different image in their head. That's the magic of the written word. Put one word next to another, and another next to it, and another...suddenly, you have a thing of beauty, or at least of meaning. Put them together in another way, and you have a new piece of magic. It's all about order, just like music. And sometimes, it becomes music.