Writing

Somewhat stream-of-conscious response to someone asking me about writing and creativity a month or so back.


I wouldn't have the audacity to say seriously that I write for myself. That would be strangely egotistical of me like I was saying that other people weren't good enough for my writing. It's true, of course, that I write for myself. I like writing, it's a beautiful escape into a land that can be anything I like. I like that I can write something I would like to read. But I don't just write for myself. If I were to write only for myself my thoughts might never be recorded in any way. I spend my whole day narrating my real (and imagined) life to myself. You never get to read that stuff. Not how it is initially anyway. But some of the ideas and concepts and lines and thoughts that I have do eventually make it into some kind of record. I'll write it into a story or a poem or a rant or a post somewhere or even a roleplay. I obviously write these things down because I want them to be read. If I were the only one to appreciate them they'd be gone when I died. I write for an audience. I imagine this audience is a bit like myself in some discernible ways but that at the same time the members of the audience can also be markedly different from myself. I want them to appreciate the writing the way it is to- not want to change the format that I chose or correct my supposed grammatical errors because they know that that's part of the writing. I don't want to write for any audience though. I feel confidence I could write for the audience, the mass market. I could write an awful Vampire romance and dress it up in SAT words and fill it full of clichés and become a best seller for a few minutes. I just want to write for an audience, whoever they are.
My writing starts with a thought. Sometimes it can come on demand but at other times I could not come up with a single thought worth committing to paper. I think about things. I never stop thinking. I read and I think and I walk and I think and I write and I think and I talk to people and I think. I have some of the same thoughts that chase through my head in a logical progression again and again. I have a lot of thoughts I prefer not to think. These are my denials. It's easier not to think about things I don't want to think about if I think about other things. Unfortunately I usually run out of good things to think about so I start to make things up. I look around me and try to see things other people miss or things I'd missed before. I could sit in the same room day after day and see something new to inspire me.
Sometimes the thought is about what I'm looking at. I'll look outside and I'll see the trees and I'll see growth and life and beautiful natural things. Sometimes the thought can be much more abstract. I can be looking out into the lobby where I work and see how the different corridors come together and think of the heart of a city, physical and then metaphorical. Sometimes the thoughts in my head will run together, the lyrics of a song will get tangled up with the thread of a thought involving a new scientific theory and something entirely new will emerge.