What does it mean to write?
Almost all of us, in one form or another, write on a daily basis. Whether it be for university classes, personal diaries, texting, and all the other myriad forms of writing that exist today, one cannot deny the essentiality of writing. However, have you ever asked yourself what it means to write?
More often than not, we do not question the meaning behind our own actions. We simply do them. Perhaps, one can put this down to the fast paced nature of modern life. After all, we hardly have any time to relax ourselves, so how can one expect us to meditate, reflect, ruminate upon our actions and decisions? That hardly seems fair and the truth is that it is not fair. Alas, it is the world we live in.
To those of you who thought about such a question before (or perhaps one in a similar vein to it), what was your answer? Such a question could never have a universal answer because every single human being has a little unique style to them. Perhaps some of you used writing as a medium to communicate with, while some used it as a way to channel their emotions. There is no perfect answer here. Only your answer exists.
For those of you who may have never pondered such a topic before, let me help you by sharing my personal answer to it. To write is to discover the world hidden inside of our world, the world between the lines.
Is the writer the creator or the discoverer of the story?
For me, a writer’s job bears an uncanny similarity to that of a ferryman. You may ask yourself “how so? A writer uses words to convey the meaning of thing, while the ferryman gets people from one side of the river to another”.
Simply put, the characters in the story are the writers of the story. They are real and they do exist. They live their lives struggling with both mundanity and climaxes. They feel love, hate, joy, sorrow, anger, and sadness just like everyone else. At the end of their life, they are sent to cross a river with the help of a ferryman. From one riverbank to another.
During such a journey, they tell the ferryman of their lives. By the end of the long voyage, the ferryman would have come to know almost every detail of their story. Thus, the ferryman no longer is a ferryman. Rather, he becomes a scribe documenting his travelers’ lives. Case in point, the writer is the ferryman and the ferryman is the writer.
I personally find that writers do not create their own stories; rather, they draw upon their discoveries about the world we live in, whether these discoveries are imaginary or real. Those discoveries are the so called “characters” of the story (to the ferryman, they are known as travelers). Writers simply weave words to tell the story of those characters.
One personal experience of mine is when I knitted together the expression, “like the loneliness of a leaf in autumn”. During one particular autumn a few years back, I saw a leaf getting carried by the wind away from the tree that was all it has ever known. I asked myself, “Isn’t this leaf, whose fate moved from the stability of the tree to the erratic nature of the wind, lonely?”.
It may seem a fool’s errand to contemplate the emotional state of an inanimate object such as a leaf; however, that is not the point. The point here is the discovery of the world of the leaf in autumn. It is a cruel and lonely world away from its home and place of birth. It is that world that gave birth to my expression. I simply connected it all together. It is as Elizabeth Bowen says:
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Links
What does it mean to be a writer?
What do writers say about writing?
Questions
What is the meaning behind your writing?
Do you think writers discover or create?
Have you ever thought about writing beyond the scope of a book?
i think i write just to get things out of my head, whether it is a plethora of emotions or an idea that’s sparked up. a lot of writing is stumbling onto an idea out of nowhere but i think creating is still a large part of the writing process. the best of writers makes their huge efforts look effortless. Nabokov’s writing, for example, is so incredibly layered with meaning, metaphor, and allusions that it would take a singular person several re-readings to even glean part of it.
as for writing, i enjoy writing short stories and journalling
I love this, Fares! Amazing work!
Although I don’t write much, when I occasionally do write, I love to write about something that I can sense and feel. Such feelings cannot be created, rather explored and discovered. Therefore, I do believe that writers tend to write about things they’ve discovered, relating to themselves, nature, or other things.
Also, I loved the description of the leaf in Autumn! I think it is very creative and heart touching, carrying a ton of meanings and emotions.
Amazing work Fares! This was an insightful read that got me thinking about the meaning behind my own writing. In answer to your first question, the meaning behind my writing is to express myself and share my thoughts with others. As for whether writers discover or create, I believe it is a bit of both. Writers draw upon their own experiences and observations to create stories, but at the same time, they discover new insights and perspectives through their writing. Finally, I have thought about writing beyond the scope of a book, and I believe that writing can take on many different forms, including poetry, journaling, and even social media posts.
Great insights, well done Fares. I personally think writing is one of the most therapeutic things to do. There is a lot of thought and effort put into the things one writes. Therefore, my answer to your first question would be that there is definitely so much meaning behind writing. For the same sentence two writers can jot down, different meanings could be interpreted, and sometimes different underlying messages are intended. Overall, this was such an interesting read. Great job!
This was very interesting to read! I have never really stopped and thought of the meaning of my writing, but now that I think of it, I think my writing is all about expressing my emotions and reflecting on my feelings after certain situations that I experience. Writing feels natural to me, and I do not really follow a specific structure when I journal, I tend to just write down all my thoughts.
This was a very thought-provoking blog post. Thank you Fares!! The description of the leaf is really interesting!!
Since I occasionally write and draw, I often struggle with deciding whether to write or draw the ideas I have; therefore, I attempt to combine the two whenever possible. It all boils down to the message I want to convey and the feeling I want to evoke. A while back, a writer friend of mine shared a personality test on uquiz called “What emotion do you create from?” It was extremely interesting to see what feelings I take inspiration from when I write and draw. I do agree with Kafka that there is immense value in writing even though there are times when words are insufficient. Regardless, we are able to read between the lines and form our own interpretations and emotional attachments to texts when words alone are unable to capture everything.
In my perspective, writers are more likely to make discoveries than they are to create. Even when a writer builds a world, it ultimately ends up looking a lot like ours. No matter how bizarre or fantastical it becomes, fiction must always be grounded in reality to some extent. It is a combination of the two because writers can undoubtedly develop creative ways to do and describe things.
This is such an intriguing question, and your perspective is super interesting. Although I’ve never thought about writing as discovery rather than creation, it makes sense because almost everything that we know comes from somewhere/someone else, and what we can imagine is a reconstruction of things we’ve already seen. Nice work, this gave me lots to think about!
Very interesting perspective! I used to enjoy writing fictional short stories as a child, but now I find that I enjoy writing more analytical pieces. However, I find that I agree with you – I think writers discover their characters. Often, the character can be loosely based on a person the writer knows, or a person the writer wishes they were, or weren’t. Although stories are affected greatly by our imaginations, these imaginations are often affected by the life we lived and the world around us. Overall, great post, Fares!
So insightful! We use writing in many aspects of our lives but we rarely recognize its value. I think writers are on a discover their own abilities through a journey of creation. It is true that they create worlds and dimensions that can’t be established in reality but this itself is a discovery of their thoughts. Writing can reveal a lot about yourself to yourself. Personally, I use writing as a release of emotions and this expressions tends to take form of spoken word poetry. I guess your post has sparked my interest in slam poetry!
Really well made blog post Fares and I really liked reading it. To answer your question, I too believe that all characters already exist but not in the way most people might think. With thousands of years of literature and endless amounts of source material, I believe its only rational to conclude that all the different types of characters that could be created have already been created. When considering the impact of the literature we consume on our own writing, I think all of our characters are nothing more than variations of characters that already exist in the books we have read, and all we do is put our own spin on the character. I do not believe that is creating a new character. Perhaps once, writers truly did create characters (it can be argued the characters in the first stories ever created were just descriptions of real people in the author’s life), with those authors and those characters then gaining recognition for defining what it means to be that type of character. For example, the “adventurer” character in the videogame series “Uncharted” is Nathan Drake is described as a “charismatic and good-natured yet rebellious treasure hunter”. However, when given that description, my mind instantly goes to Han Solo from the “Star Wars” franchise or Indiana Jones from the “Indiana Jones” movie series (who was, in fact, a inspiration for Nathan Drake). The character of Indiana Jones himself was based on and took heavy inspiration from 1930s film serial treasure hunters and pulp action heroes such as Dan Turner from the “Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective” comic series and El Coyote from the “El Coyote” comic series. The adventurer character has always existed, or has existed for many decades, and every few years he is remade, redefined, given a new name and shape, but he remains the same character. I guess my point is, characters exist as roles or as broad definitions, with one character or real person who defines what it means to be that character (think Indiana Jones as the adventurer character or Sherlock Holmes as the detective character), and all other characters that later come to fill that role are just deviations and variations of the original, defining character.
Amazing post Fares! To answer your question I believe writers create because whatever they are putting on a page, is something no one has ever done before them, they bring their words, their ideas, and their beliefs to life. They give birth to new characters and new words with a stroke of a pen. This is why writing is so beautiful, to think the entirety of Hogwarts was a figment in Rowling’s imagination, or that Middle Earth was something Tolkien just thought about, these ideas were brought into life in the most beautiful of ways.