Why do we write?

Mind
Your
Language I
Tessa Ransford on the motivation behind the word

Mordechai Vanunu

We need to ask not only what makes us writers, but what makes us write what we write. Is it a displacement activity to get us through the ordeal of life? Or is it our best way of contributing what we can to the wellbeing of humankind and life on earth? Perhaps it is something of both. If writing is a figure of thought, a way in which to think, then the thinking ultimately matters. What does our writing tell us about ourselves and our relation to society? Meaning in life is not something lying out there to be discovered so much as something we ourselves have to construct. 'Be not weary in making what is beautiful', wrote St Paul, (2 Thess. 3:13) and Keats stated the integrated relationship of beauty and 'truth'. It is beautiful because true, and I am prepared to suffer for it, might be the artists' creed.
     I believe that the desire to construct some meaning in our experience of life and, through writing, to contribute to the justice and peace of our society, whether at individual, group, national or international level, is a very real motive for becoming a writer. If children were told this, they would want to learn to be good writers. As Nick Henderson remarks [SR no. 82] when explaining his poverty activism in Dundee, it helped him to become a better writer. If we have something we want to say we want to be able to say it well. We cannot have a democracy without writers who are free to write, nor can we have a democracy without 'the democratic intellect'. This means different points of view, ways of understanding the world and creating significance or meaning in it, expressed in the search for a consensual way forward. Not only does this need to happen between individuals and groups and nations, but also within our own heads, where there will also be differing views interacting.
     We may think what we write is quite arbitrary but, as it comes from us as individuals, we cannot pretend it is a matter of indifference to us. If we have convictions they will emerge. If we do not, that will also become apparent. Yeats' famous line in 'The Second Coming' that the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity should stand as a warning but not a veto on all writing that seeks to understand justice or look for meaning. Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned for 18 years by the Israelis for telling the world about their nuclear weapons and is still intimidated and harassed by them, not allowed to leave the country. He is quoted as stating: 'If you are not free to speak you are not a human being'. The former East German poets whom I translated in 2002-3 were also quite clear that people pay in person for the ideologies of their political masters: 'Freedom's unscathed' writes Andreas Reimann of Leipzig (in his sonnet 'The New Era'), whose journalist parents were eliminated by the regime and was himself frequently imprisoned and harassed all his life. 'It's you who bear the scars.'
     Jirí Gruša from the Czech Republic, a former prisoner of conscience, who was himself an exile in Germany, is an excellent International PEN president. He asks about the price of freedom and whether writing can always be a peaceful activity. The theatre of writing is the battleground of meaning, he has stated. It is constantly stressed in International PEN that without the writer-as-witness there can be no situation in which moral pressure could be brought to bear on governments in support of human rights and freedom of expression. Heinrich Heine wrote, a hundred years before the Nazi burning of books in Berlin: 'When books are burnt, eventually people will be burnt too'. ('Wenn man Bücher verbrennt, dann werden auch Menschen am Ende verbrannt.') There can be many witnesses with different stories, and witnesses may have to suffer for choosing to be so, but they are always of the time and place and therefore also make history, linking past to future by constituting a living present.