Why I Write...Exercises for a New Season of Writing

Often at the beginning of a workshop I ask my students to write a manifesto about what they want to say in their writing as well as an essay about why they write. I recommend they return to this exercise often, as these tectonic plates shift with age and experience.

This is an exercise that often takes early writers by surprise. It isn’t that they don’t know what they want to do, or that their reasons are muddy, but they are often a bit battered by the difficulty of writing and that can stand in their way of remembering their clear purpose. What’s this all about anyway? How did I end up here? Let’s explore, and lay claim.

There are many marvelous essays about why people write, including these two:

Why I Write by George Orwell

On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion

I ask that people be honest about what they want to write. People come into MFA programs believing that they have to be literary writers and have ambitions to take their place among the vaunted of their day, and perhaps among the movable feast of the canon, too. I thought so too, once upon a time, and taught to that end. But I started to see it differently after going through doubts and fears with students, and discovering that often the key to their writing problems was simply that they’d stopped writing naturally and were trying to imitate—and weren’t good at it. Literary glory is a narrow channel of writing. Students have been widely exposed to it through school, and therefore often believe that’s what they should be aiming for with their desire to write, but I have seen too many people stop writing because what they thought of as good writing wasn’t what excited them, or got them in front of a page.

About ten years ago I started asking students to write about their happiest writing experiences in as much detail as possible, and to do so on three consecutive days, starting over, adding detail, and also adding present feelings as they came up. I adapted this exercise from the work of James Pennebaker, who found that having trauma survivors write out the details of their experiences over a four day time period, fifteen minutes a day, including both past and present emotion, greatly alleviated their depressive responses to their memories. Why not examine what writing felt best in the same way, and see if some routines or practices might be derived from the exercise?

Write about a time you wrote for hours with deep concentration and pleasure.

What were you writing about when you stayed up all night to write?

The first time I did and students read their experiences aloud, one after the next wrote about writing into the hour of the wolf a piece of fan fiction. One wrote a novel about the South Korean pop band BTS all working together in a publishing company. Another wrote about characters from a favorite series as younger children, and so on. This fascinated me. I thought I came up before the age of fan fiction, but then I remembered that my first novels were about talking bears who intervened with and offered wisdom to their human families. Paddington. A little bit later I wrote many pages of Beatles fan fiction. I had a role in these dramas as George Harrison’s sister. I gave him wise bear-like advice about his conflicts with Paul, who often annoyed him. I spent hours on this, in the time melting way of what is referred to as a flow state. Isn’t one of the greatest feelings losing track of time? When it happens I always feel exalted, like I went somewhere amazing. The time free zone.

Anyway, fan fiction. Often the answer to Why I Write is because we loved a book and want to make one too. Examine this feeling. Is there a conversation you want to have with a book you love? (I’ve gotten to the point where I find all fiction is fan fiction of differing degrees, and this is liberating. More on that another time.)

So…

Why I Write

My Best Writing Experiences

and one more. This one is often a revelation to writers. Let’s call it

My Writing Rhythm

Take a few days to make notes about what happens when you write. Do you go strong for 45 minutes and then find your mind wandering? Do you do better if you have a whole day, or feel like like you can’t write if you only have twenty minutes? Take notes about your rhythms and use them to adjust your schedule. If writing for an hour a day leaves you feeling like you are stupid because you really hit your stride at ninety minutes, arrange to write for two hours and when you have less time, perhaps work on a discreet task, such as describing a landscape or sketching dialogue. This is all about getting in touch with your flow state and figuring out ways to coax it forward. Doing this changed my life. I was chastising myself for time constraints, not my writing after all. We really have to be on our own sides in this thing of ours. It’s the start of a new season. On our own side, knowing why we write and how schedule it will set us up for joy in the doing.