Why do you write?  In answer to this perennial question, poet and memoirist Mary Karr replied, “I write to dream; to connect with other human beings; to record; to clarify; to visit the dead.  I have a kind of primitive need to leave my mark on the world.”  “I write,” Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan maintained, “because when I’m writing…I feel as if I’ve been transported outside myself.”  Best-selling author Jane Smiley responded she wrote “to investigate things she was curious about” while James Frey, screenwriter and memoirist behind the controversial A Million Little Pieces, wisecracked he wrote because he “wasn’t really qualified to do much else.”  Other literary luminaries confided writing was a foundational part of their identity, a vocation inseparable from their sense of self.  Being a writer was often described as a destiny etched in the firmament, a kind of fate rather than a conscious choice.  In her timeless essay “Why I Write,” originally published in the New York Times Book Review in December of 1976 and found in The Writer on Her Work Volume I, Joan Didion divulges why she personally writes.

In her gorgeously understated prose, Didion defines writing as a forceful, even belligerent expression of self:

“Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell.  One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write.  There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.  Its an aggressive, even a hostile act.  You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the readers most private space.” 

Later, Didion confesses she always felt like a foreigner in the republic of ideas.  Unlike her peers in Berkeley academia, she was fascinated not by abstractions but by what she could “see and smell and touch”:

“I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts.  During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.

In short I tried to think.  I failed.  My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral.  I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.  I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill.  When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong.  I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked.  A physical fact…

I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in “Paradise Lost,” the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer.  But I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.  In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus.  During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas.  I knew I couldn’t think.  All I knew then was what I couldn’t do.  All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.”

Contemplating the titular question of what compels her to put pen to page, Didion explains that for her— much like Henry Miller— writing is a voyage of discovery, a safari into the most unfathomable depths of the self.  With a hint of self-deprecation, she reveals:

“Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer.  Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.  I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.”