Why I Write
There’s only ever been one reason I write, and that’s because I enjoy it. Originally, in about fourth grade, I decided that I wanted to set my entire life on one track. Being exceptional at a few things was too boring for me; I wanted to be absolutely perfect at just one, spectacular thing. So I searched for what interested me, what wasn’t too drab. Drawing and painting, math and science, it was all too common. I soon realized that I hated everything I was good at; there was no room for improvement, no room for discovery. I wanted to be good at something that I had never done before, something that I was awful at so that I could go from the bottom to the top. And that one thing was writing.
When I was in about fifth grade, my only option was to read. English classes gave me no good information about writing at all, so I read tons of books about fantasy, war and anything a little kid would find exciting. Every once in a while I would put what I knew to the test, attempting and failing miserably to write the same way. I was frustrated, because the words never worked. They stood stock-still, refusing to flow like the words of all good stories. Of course, I was only in the fifth grade, so the expectations I had of my own writing were extremely high. Nevertheless, I continued to go about my regular routine.
Soon, between sixth and seventh grade, I began to take my writing more seriously. After a bit of studying, I realized what writing was really about. I thought about how no great writer has written about someone else’s experience and been able to put it to their own words efficiently. I stopped trying to copy the books I read, and I wrote entirely out of my own thoughts. Contrary to what I believed, each one of my stories seemed to end up turning dark. Characters died, villains destroyed cities, and the end was almost never happy. No main character was ever a hero; just a simple, normal person who was sucked into a terrible catastrophe. When I learned how I naturally wrote and thought, I tried to perfect that style and stick to it. I told stories that never had happened, but they were in reference to real life events. I read more books about people who struggled, fighting their way through a sea of evil that never ceased, although they had never done a thing to deserve it. I was fascinated in how I wrote this way, even though nothing had ever happened to me. That’s when it hit me; I was an observer.
Of course, this was just a short name to a complex way of life. To put it simply, I had done nothing but watch the world and everyone in it evolve in character, slowly becoming who they always were. Well, at the time it seemed simple. Anyhow, all of my characters acted the same way I’ve seen many of those around me, which is why they’ve never been heroes before. As I began to perfect this form of writing at the beginning of seventh grade, I knew that my writing career was coming closer and closer every day.
After a lot of preparation, I decided to go further with my writing and step away from my comfortable corner of a single genre, and I tried to repeat what I had done before. I read books, found genres and wrote using them and them only; most of which failed and didn’t interest me in the slightest. But even now the genres are all coming together into one style of writing that I and I alone use. That’s what I learned about writing in those years. No one can write like someone else, or they won’t be able to write at all. And even though my style is dark and miserable, I found out who I was as a writer on the way.
And that is the obscenely long-winded answer to why I write. If I had to summarize it, I’d say I write because I always have. I write because I do, and because I didn’t.
