ONE MAY AS WELL ASK WHY WE THINK.
Why do we write? I’d say we do so to explore and to learn. Sometimes, to explain, to clarify, to share. Always — and not just with fiction — to create. We write, some of us, because we must. It’s as natural as thought, and as inevitable.
We write for the same reason that we read: for the sheer pleasure, the utter delight of it. To revel in the words, to roll them about on our tongues, feel them shiver into place on the page. To weave worlds. We read to wander beyond the confines of our lives, of our daily realities, of our own allotted time and place in this unfolding tapestry. To time travel. To world travel. To try on the perspective of others.
That, most particularly with narrative.
We write to make our mark. To join the grand conversations unfurling over the brief decades of our individual lives and back across the long centuries, back, back, back to the far recesses of recorded time, to the fragments of record-keeping and tallying preserved in clay and scroll, the distant touch of lives that once thrived in another world. To add our own leaf to those conversations, near and far. To commune with thought. To pick our way through thorny issues and difficult questions, matters of state, matters of the heart. To play, to dance, to be. To arrive at clarity. To shout: I was here.
To quell the darkness.