Why I Write (For Culture Vultures) and Why You Should Too.

I’m often asked, “why do you write?”

Depending on tone of voice I make a quick decision as to whether this is genuine curiousity about the genesis of my small but finely honed literary talent, or, as is more likely, I’m faced with the fury of somebody I’ve maligned or misrepresented recently. Then it’s fight or fabulate.

The last time I answered, “because I can’t play the guitar.”

This may be a segment or so short of the whole chocolate orange – and it may be significant that I’d swigged half a bottle of Finnish Licorice Vodka ten minutes previously – but I’m pretty sure there’s a hint of the real truth in that.

Have you ever wondered why nobody who plays guitar ever writes a novel? Guitarists can barely manage a text message never mind anything demanding a lengthy stretch of concentration. They don’t need to. A guitar is the key that unlocks the palace of excess, extravagance, and unlimited indulgence. If you can strum three chords on a guitar you get to do that windmill thing with your arms, stick out your tongue for no apparent reason, slide across the floor on your knees with your head flung back and your spangled shirt all open, and look way cooler than anybody who simply wrote a bloody song.

You can wreck the occasional hotel room too. It’s part of the job description.

Brilliant!

Most writers can’t even afford a hotel room. The only physical movement observable is the chewing of fingernails and the scrunching of paper.

Guitarists get the girls. Writers get piles.

I’m not selling this writing malarkey that well, am I?

If you ask a writer why they do it they are generally not that helpful. And the more famous they are the more full of high minded windy worthiness they tend to be.

Orwell in “Why I Write,” said it was all about righting wrongs and setting the world straight.

Joan Didion, poaching Orwell’s essay title, claimed that “setting words on paper is the tactic of the secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the readers secret space.”

I couldn’t bear to read another word of Didion after that – I don’t think bullying is big or clever. And I’m constitutionally incapable of caring about ideological combat. I’m fine with the world a bit wonky and woeful and I can’t see the point in trying to reform anyone else’s opinions when my own are so unsure and insupportable. That’s not why I write, at all.

One of my favourite writers said it best. H L Mencken had political opinions that would have made Orwell organise a firing squad, and he had none of Didion’s flaunted sensitivity, masking a secret superiority and bullying style. He was funny, fearless, and said exactly what he thought regardless of political correctness, ideological fashion or the influence of friends in high places. He said that the writer’s ” . . . overpowering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow man, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilised countries, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.”

Of course Mencken was writing before it was considered problematic to use pronouns so casually, and he knew that women could gyrate and flap and yell as well as any man (he married a writer, for heavens sake!) The only thing I’d improve in this passage is the idea that self-expression is an end in itself – it seems to me that all that commotion is meant to encourage other people to drop their inhibitions, accept the ridiculous, and join in . . . you can’t improve people, and bullying always backfires, but you can invite people, tease people, and seduce people to join you in the collective barbaric yawp. Self-expression should be fun.

So that’s the main reason I write. Perhaps it’s not as fun as wielding an axe and cranking the amp up to eleven, but it’s the best I can do. And that’s why I’m writing for Culture Vultures and encouraging you to do so too, so I don’t look such a plonker gyrating alone . . .