Why Do you Write

The readers’ cry to us writers is: 
"Comfort me." 
"Amuse me." 
"Touch me." 
"Make me dream." 
"Make me laugh." 
"Make me shudder." 
"Make me weep." 
"Make me think." 
Only a few chosen souls say to the artist: "Just give me something good in any form that suits you and your mood best …" 
Talent comes from originality, which is a special way of thinking, seeing, understanding, and judging.
Each of us, according to our nature, creates an illusion of the world, an illusion that is poetic, sentimental, joyful, melancholy, foul, or gloomy… Great artists are those who can make others see their own particular illusion. 
These are Maupaussant’s words from his brief essay on the novel written almost 140 years ago. He adds: You need to be truly quite mad, quite reckless, quite arrogant, or quite stupid to write still today!
But there is no escape, he concludes, for us who persist in making writing our work. We can’t but keep fighting against the unsurmountable discomfort that comes over us in front of the blank page. Talent is long patience.
An American magazine asked Why Do You Write? to a large number of writers. It received hundreds of answers. Here are a few:
“To offer a mirror to the reader. To satisfy my desire for revenge. To produce order out of chaos. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a work of art. To paint a portrait of society and its ills. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. To make money so I can sneer at those who formerly sneered at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. To make myself appear more interesting than I am. To attract the love of a beautiful woman. To attract the love of a man. To rectify the imperfections of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To make a name that would survive death. To upend the establishment. To cope with my depression. To pass the time, even if it would have passed anyway.” 
Margaret Atwood cites these banal answers in her astonishing book on writing Negotiating with the Dead. 
It is difficult to explain why a mentally stable person would leave Terra Firma to embark on such a risky voyage as writing.
The journey of writing actually produces just one story that has kept repeating itself ever since man started telling stories, that of the book of all books: Tell me, O Muse, of the man who wandered… and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea…
Woody Allen in “Zelig”: I’m 12 years old. I run into a Synagogue. I ask the Rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life... But, he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don’t understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me six hundred dollars for Hebrew lessons.
You can’t teach the meaning of life, but you can teach someone a language. However, it costs a great deal to learn a language well enough to discuss the “meaning” we are all searching for. It costs even more to learn how to be a writer.
Most people are secretly convinced they have a book inside them. There is some truth to this. Many of us have life experiences others would like to read about in a book. But that’s not the same thing as being a writer. Or, to say it in a more sinister way, Atwood quips: Anyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is an undertaker.
She’s right. It takes effort, control, and precision to be an undertaker. And compassion. Because it is also a profoundly symbolic role. If you are an undertaker, you are not only a person who digs. You deal with grief and death. So, it is a painful job that places you in crucial moments of life, yours above all, and others’. You look around at grieving men and women; you watch them cry, but you cannot cry with them. If you do, you’re pathetic. You watch them laugh, but you can’t laugh with them. If you do, you’re banal. You must carry out your work with great detachment. Two opposites embrace when committing to write: participation and cynicism. In this regard, I can see Molière sitting for entire afternoons in the anteroom of his barber like any customer waiting. His bowed head might seem sluggish, but he has a notebook on his knees along with a quill and a bottle of ink. He listens and transcribes the voices, the words, and the emotions of unknown people wandering into the shop hoping to beautify their image and put some order to it, all the while confiding, wondering out loud, and revealing themselves. These dead will find life on the stage boards tred by that great man.
All writers have to go from the now to the once upon a time. Even if this once upon a time happened just an hour ago. Even if the dead man is still warm in his bed. The dead want their story told, says Atwood, and it is so true. Sufferers of the writing disease are deafened by the calls of the dead who want to speak, terrified by the injustice of oblivion.
In the end, nostalgia is what moves writing. Nostalgia for what has been and is no longer. Nostalgia for what could be and yet is not. “Nostalgia,” from the Greek, “pain of return.” The return to what one imagined but did not live. And the return to what one lived without having been able, at the time, to imagine. 
The writer, however, is also the opposite of the undertaker. The writer does dig a hole, not to bury something but to bring it back to life. The best answer to the question Why do you write? is perhaps this: To make light in the darkness. “My” darkness. “Our” darkness.