Why do I write?

Why do I write?

It’s a question that has evoked different responses in me over the past many years.

If you had asked me just yesterday, I would have said that it translates to a good pizza, paid bills, and fewer worries on my mind. But there were days when I was so immersed in writing. And this is a blog about the different reasons and motivations that led me to write.

At one point in my life, after reading a lot of Kafka’s works and biography, I rented a small place just for work and writing. (I used to name my writing places, the weirdest were “The Fuhrer Bunker”, which was a make-shift room using movable partitions I made using metal frames, metal sheets, and flex banners; the one I’m talking about here was called “THE NEST”)

The Nest, a small room that looked as if two rooms were chopped in half and welded together like a hybrid plant by a hasty engineer. I didn’t have a full room but two half-rooms, perhaps the math would be almost a room and a quarter.

But the real reason I picked the space was the open terrace surrounding the spaces, which was three times the tinpot I had rented, which made my place exception for writing.

Some of the important decisions, especially business ones were taken on that terrace space.

I would live my Kafka life by getting a large notebook, grab a couple of my favorite fountain pens with different ink colors, start my writing session after dinner and wrap it up when the sun was up in the morning.

Why did I write? Why did I write?

I sure scared some of my neighbors during that adventure.

The fluorescent lamps were just too bright and distracting, and candles would go off too often because of the strong winds (and that arid smog that was brought along with the winds like a surprise gift from the distant chimneys at the horizon) I got myself a battery-powered, hand-held light with adjustable brightness.

So, anyone looking up from the windows would have seen a silhouette of a man, with an illuminated face in a sea of darkness, bowing down and doing something on the table. I’m glad no one called 100 (or 911) on me.  

So, why this madness? What was I doing? Why did I write?

Writing gave my thoughts a form. My mind would quieten down when I start writing. I often felt like a court reporter taking down live testimonies.

Fast forward a couple of years… I’m clicking away at my laptop, a software called “Focus Write” before me with its custom background on it, with images from forlorn to out-of-the-world, depending on whatever my state of mind was at that moment. I was cruising on my laptop or blazing at the keyboard, I could say.

If you had stopped me, to ask that silly question, there is a high probability of running into a madman, the risk of having to face a scorning, condescending, expletive-laden face.

But that was that.

I would simply have told you something that I realized from time to time, as if perpetually, repetitively.

That word is CLARITY.

WRITING gave me clarity. ON what, you would have asked? I would have just smiled and gotten back to writing.

If we were to roll back my life, back by a decade, me in my hostel room during those two hours they deem as “study hour”. How I loathed those sessions! It was as if we were misbehaving children locked up in a correctional facility.  

For me, I just let my pen go on a rampage, my anger would find peace between the ruled lines of my notebook. I wrote about the absurdity of engineering education, about missing my happy days as a chess professional, satirical pieces on my college professors ( I still remember the one about Mr. Frankinstein), dreams, ideas, whims, complaints about the food, about social issues and whatnot.

My writing notebook was full of chaos. You should have asked me why I was doing all that.

I found in my notebook, a friend, who would patiently listen to all my worries, I found meaning in my notebook, a sense of purpose in this crazy life.

And as my days roll by, I wonder what my future self would say if you were going to ask him just WHY he writes.