Motivation

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about value and worth as they relate to our commodities of time and money, but I’d rather not write about that today. I’d like that idea to marinate for a while longer, and hopefully I will soon have something cohesive to say about the subject, perhaps something earth shattering and inspirational. Today is not that day.

Instead I have something slightly related that has been both lurking in the back of my mind and just leaped out at me a half hour ago as I was reading Shelley for my Brit Lit class.

Why do we write?

If we want to be boring the answer is obvious. We write because we want to communicate our ideas, but there are a hundred more ideas tied to this conceit (yes, exactly 100. I counted them). Why do we want to communicate? Which ideas? What makes us think these ideas are worth communicating? Are you getting some kind of validation from writing? Do you want to change the way people think? Do you want to make them happy, make them afraid, do you want to entertain? To inform? Why? Why?

Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake, all three were poets who wrote in rebellion to John Locke and Cartesian Dualism which is fine, but notice that Locke and Descartes were philosophers, not poets. Philosophers shaped the world these three railed against, and philosophers shaped it after. If you really want to change the world with a Liberal Arts degree, the English department is not the place to start! Shelley wanted to fight injustice, but again, he was a poet. When you hear about the movers and shakers of social reform his name is not on the list. Wilberforce is there. Shelley isn’t. If social justice was his aim then politics may have been a more efficient choice. We see that poets don’t change anything. At best they serve as a marker of the times, showing what some people were thinking during the French Revolution, for example.

I think of the writers that I have met and talked to, and there is no uniform answer to the question from them. Writers are creative people, we do things without questioning it and this is often the point; we express our thought and/or emotion and throw it out before pausing to modify them, edit them, make them fit into social norms that people can look at and read and wear without feeling uncomfortable. If we knew what it was that we were saying or doing and why we would be tempted to temper it down because we also tend to be needy, we crave acceptance just like anyone else. When we are afraid that our art is too much we worry, we try to change it, and it becomes something that it shouldn’t have been. What I am trying to say is that most artists, writers included, have no clue why we do what we do and this is a good thing. When you ask us we will come up with some silly answer (like the one above) that we may or may not believe ourselves, but we don’t really know.

Maybe a better question for me is “why do they make me read Shelley?”