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dazedandlucid · 5 years

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as a writer, what do you think is the purpose of writing stories? i mean, what makes them worth writing? or what motivates you to keep writing/posting something that might not get to an audience that cares. and what can you do about that ugly feeling that, it's better if you just don't write something? sorry if this is annoying or if it sounds kind of rude 🤕 i'm just very curious as to what is your take on this stuff, tho don't reply if i asked too many things 🥴

so i caught this just as i was checking tumblr for the day so you’re getting your answer a lot quicker than you maybe expected (or wanted!). i know you’re talking about fanfiction (i’m assuming but considering what i write and where we are) but i kind of highjacked this to talk in general about story telling and why we do things that don’t on a surface level have any meaning. so sorry about that.

anywho. here goes:

this is a question i’ve gotten a lot to varyfing degrees but your question specifically is asking a lot of things. you use two words that i think are very central to how we live our lives today. “purpose” and “worth”. everything we do today feels like it should have both. i’ve seen so many people my age and older and younger berate themselves if every second of their lives isn’t going toward fulfilling some very specific goal, whatever that goal or endline is. we’re so hyperconscious of our time, how finite it is, get constantly bombarded with messages to search for our meaning, our purpose (and more increasingly and with clear reason of being, how little we may have of it as a species). how much of a waste it is if we don’t spend all of our resources to do this. this intersected with how everything in our society is structured through this idea that everything has an inherent value (yes i’m talking about capitaism) makes a lot of us scratch our heads at why anyone spends time doing anything that doesn’t have an immediate obvious traceable meaning. and that menaing to us modern day peeps translates to $$$$. so if you’re not making money off of it, why do you “waste” your time doing it? and that brings us to stories and why anyone ever tells them or thinks them worth writing down or sharing at all.

telling stories is old. like really old. it outdates the written word. it outdates our modern conception of economy and trading goods (and yes art is a good) for monetary compensation. there isn’t, as far as i know but please correct me, a failproof yes or no answer to why people started to tell each other stories. it used to be the one way memories could be passed down from one generation to the next. it was how people learned morality, religion (mythology is just one big story being told again and again the world over), history. once people figured out how to write things down, oral story telling wasn’t necessary in the same way. but the stories didn’t stop. they grew and expanded and changed. they became more fantastical in some ways, more common or mundane in others. there started to be stories about a variety of things (but still a lot about morality and religion and history). stories started becoming structured. the haiku, ballads, the play, the treatise, diaries, the novel (even though a lot of these concepts existed with the oral traditions as well. ways to record it gave it clearer memory, clearer structure). and for most of the first people who wrote these things, there wasn’t monetary compensation waiting at the end of their first draft. or an audience. or recognition. there wasn’t a promise of much of anything really and a lot of them languished in obscurity for years. or decades. or their entire lifetimes. so why did they write these things? why now, when the written word has been through its millenia of transformation and still (at an either very exagerated or very modest estimate) 1 in a million of a person, sees any true success with their writing, why does anyone do it? why do we share stories? especially stories we know don’t really have any inherent value in the way things we do maybe should? the truest answer i can give you is: i have no idea. i really don’t. people talk a lot about showing and learning empathy. how stories make us more emotionally intellegent sensitevely attuned people. stories are for entertainment. language and vocabulary broadening. i think for the person writing them, we’re trying to remember. not be remembered, but to remember. “this is how i felt then”. “this is how this made me feel.” “i wonder how it would feel to feel this way.” before ever writing, i never had the thought “i want to write”. or “i will be a writer”. just one day i started seeing sentences in my head. scenes. story ideas. specific ways to articulate broader concepts. why do we write? it’s like asking why a painter paints when we have photographs now. why photographers still pursue their careerers when everyone is a photographer now. i think they’re all just trying to remember. what life, what it feels like to be human or to be a person, in that moment is like. whatever that means to each individual. and i think you share it because some part of you recognizes that that’s what everyone is trying to do. we’re all chasing that feeling, that alive feeling, that i’m here, i’ve experienced, this i’ve known this, i’ve never experienced this but now i can imagine what it’s like to if even a bit. it’s why film and art and music and written words have no intrinsic value and yet most people are drawn to them, seek them out, say things like “this song/band/story/artist saved my life”. all of these things are stories, and in stories, even if they’re just pure entertainment, pure escape, they say something about us. i want to escape. i want to forget. i want to be known. i want to know.

about the ugly feeling saying none of this matters so why even bother? i know that if i stop writing the world won’t end. if no one reads my things or if i never finish a single story, not a leaf will move. the world will keep spining. someone else will tell stories. this isn’t directly an answer and it isn’t getting at what you’re asking, but i’ll leave you with this quote from someone who while not a name just anyone will recognize at the drop of a hat, has been well regarded and celebrated in the literary community and yet these words are his. and i think they get at something close:

“you can’t

you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don’t write”

#ask #anon #this is not what you asked for

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