The Self Discovery of Writing, as Opposed to Writing to Discover One's Self

Eleanor got me thinking in her post below about writers and angst, and about how writing feels to me. I have a very similar impression of what writing is like--it's a struggle, where I am trying to find the right way to express a story so that I convey something important to the audience--a tone, a sense of history, a sculpted piece of life. I find it extraordinarily difficult to do, because it is important. There is nothing more fundamental to being human than the stories we tell, and what we learn from them. That is a weighty charge, and one I take seriously.

Some have said this is a romanticized view of the artist. Perhaps. I'm not suggesting that all writing needs to be "great art", but I am saying that there is a reason behind each story, and that the story needs to be told as well and as honestly as possible, and that the writer is responsible to struggle against their own lassitude in order to make the tale as vibrant, as real as possible.

Running a marathon is not easy. It requires a great deal of preparation, literally sweat and tears, and a great deal of determination. It is not, however, the length that is the great difficulty--many people, given ten or twelve hours, could walk the distance without difficulty. It is running the distance--despite the protestations of the body, despite the innumerable and colorful arguments the mind will provide for stopping--that is the task at hand. Writing a novel is no different.

Am I saying that no writing is easy? Of course not. Sometimes a runner has an amazing race, simple and efficient and gracefully easy. A scene may come into being on the first pass through that is just right, just exactly as the writer intended. A scene like this should not be tampered with, for beauty is fragile by nature, easily marred and misshapen. Writing like this is the exception, though, not the rule. Most often, we get something workable down and then have to go back two, three, five times to mold it toward what we want to get across.

I think it is the process of struggling with what we are, with who we are and what we believe, that bears out revelations about ourselves and about the world. These are very powerful moments of self-awareness, "eureka!" moments. There are people who write in order to experience this sort of revelatory moment, to learn about themselves. I believe that writers, though, push their understandings of the edges of the world not in order to learn about themselves, but in order to communicate a fresh truth; we learn more about our selves, about our mental thresholds, as we go, and that growth is excellent and important, but I don't think it is the purpose of writing. Or, at least, outward focused writing. Journaling, the keeping of a diary--that can have exactly this self-discovery as its purpose.

I'm not trying to make a black and white distinction here. The two processes are very similar in their pattern and in their outcome. But I think the writer-for-self is seeking enlightenment, inherently, and the writer-for-audience is seeking to communicate universal truths, no matter how personally they may be framed. Something for others to connect to, to identify with, perhaps even to learn from.

As always, you are free to disagree.