Why I Write — And Why You Should Too

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” — Joan Didion

There is a moment, familiar to almost every writer, when someone asks: Why do you write?

It sounds like a simple question. It is not. It is one of the most disarming questions a person can be asked, because the honest answer requires excavating something you have spent years burying — or something you have spent years trying to understand yourself. The act of writing is, at its core, a negotiation between the interior life and the exterior world, and the question of why we engage in this negotiation is as old and as unresolved as literature itself.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. Not always well. Not always purposefully. Sometimes in the margins of notebooks during boring classes, sometimes in the dark hours before sleep, sometimes because I was so angry or so sad or so bewildered by something that putting language around it was the only way to keep from dissolving. I wrote before I understood what writing was for. I write now because I can no longer imagine what I would be without it.

This essay is an attempt to answer that question — for myself, yes, but also as a kind of open letter. Because the more I read the great writers on the subject, and the more I examined the research on what writing does to the human brain and body, the more I became convinced of something: writing is not a vocation for a special, gifted few. It is a practice for every thinking, feeling human being. You do not need to want to be a novelist. You do not need to submit anything to a publisher, or start a blog, or show a single sentence to another person. You just need to write.

Here is why.

I. George Orwell’s Four Motives — And Why They’re Still True

In the summer of 1946, a literary magazine called Gangrel asked its contributors a question: Why do you write? George Orwell’s response became one of the most celebrated essays in the English language.

Orwell, already the author of Animal Farm and working toward what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four, did not romanticize his answer. He did not claim some divine mission or special sensitivity. He was characteristically blunt.

He identified four motives that drive every writer, existing in different proportions at different times:

Sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death. Orwell was honest enough to put this first. Every writer, he argued, carries a vanity engine at the core — the desire to impose oneself on the world, to say I was here and I thought this.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. The love of words and the way they land. The pleasure of rhythm, of a sentence that resolves itself perfectly, of an image that surprises the reader into seeing something they had looked at a hundred times without truly noticing. This is writing as a sensory experience, as craft.

Historical impulse. The desire to see things clearly and preserve them. The wish to record the texture of lived experience before it vanishes — not because you are a historian, but because you are alive and you know that the specific quality of this moment, this decade, this life, will disappear if no one writes it down.

Political purpose. Using political in the widest possible sense: the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to change how people think about the society they inhabit. Orwell was shaped by the Spanish Civil War, by fascism, by the rise of totalitarianism. His writing became inseparable from the conviction that language, wielded carefully, is one of the few weapons available to ordinary people against the machinery of power.

He observed that all these impulses war against one another and fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. In a peaceful age, he admitted, he might have written decorative books entirely. But the times he lived in forced a particular kind of seriousness.

What is remarkable about Orwell’s framework is how completely it holds up eighty years later. We may have swapped his pamphlets for newsletters, his typewriter for a laptop, his era for our own with its different shape of crisis — but the four motives remain recognizable as a complete accounting of the human impulse to put words on a page. Every person who has ever kept a diary, sent a carefully composed message, or started writing something and found themselves crying contains each of Orwell’s four categories in some proportion.

The egoism is real and nothing to be ashamed of. The aesthetic pleasure is real and more available to everyone than is commonly understood. The historical impulse — the desire to leave some record, to say this is what it was like — is practically universal. And the political purpose, broadly conceived, drives every person who has ever written because something made them too angry or too sad or too inspired to stay silent.

II. Joan Didion’s Deeper Answer — Writing as Excavation

In 1976, Joan Didion stood before an audience at the University of California, Berkeley to deliver a lecture. She acknowledged, right at the start, that she had borrowed her title from Orwell. But then she said something that changed the conversation entirely.

“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.”

This is a startling claim if you think about it carefully. Most people assume that writing is how you communicate what you already know. Didion was saying something nearly opposite: that she writes in order to find out. That the writing is the thinking, not the transcription of thought.

She explained how she begins with images — not characters, not plots, not even themes, but images that she called ones that “shimmer around the edges.” An image of a woman walking through a casino. The night lights above a particle accelerator. Something she cannot yet name. She sits with these images, doesn’t rush them, doesn’t try to analyze them prematurely. And then she begins to write, and in the writing, she discovers what the image means — what it has been trying to tell her.

“The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene. It tells you. You don’t tell it.”

This is one of the most honest and useful things anyone has ever said about the creative process. Writing is not a vessel into which you pour pre-formed thoughts. It is a discovery process. It is how the mind makes meaning from experience — how raw sensation and feeling and memory get organized, finally, into something you can look at from the outside.

Didion also made the point, disarmingly direct, that writing is fundamentally an act of aggression. It is the act of saying I — of imposing your particular vision of the world onto someone else’s reading time, of insisting that your way of seeing deserves attention. There is, she argued, nothing selfless about it, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

But that aggression, she implied, is also an act of love. When you write your way through a complicated experience, you are making it available — to your readers, yes, but first to yourself. You are turning the chaos of being alive into something navigable.

III. Rilke’s Demand — The Necessity Test

In 1903, an Austrian army cadet named Franz Kappus sent some of his poetry to the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke, asking for his honest assessment. What Rilke wrote back became the collection known as Letters to a Young Poet — ten letters that have served, for over a century, as a kind of compass for anyone trying to understand their own creative life.

Rilke’s first letter asked a question so severe it has frightened writers ever since.

He instructed Kappus to ask himself, in the stillest hour of his night, whether he had to write. Not whether he wanted to. Not whether he was good at it. Whether he was compelled — whether the inability to write would be, for him, a kind of death.

“Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. At its source you will find the answer to the question, whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analyzing.”

He added, with characteristic rigor, that a piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. Its only criterion is whether it had to exist — whether something in the world would have been poorer without it.

Rilke’s standard sounds impossible until you realize that necessity takes many forms. The person who journaled their way through grief was writing from necessity. The student who stayed up until 3am to finish an essay they could have half-heartedly submitted much earlier was writing from necessity. The parent who sends a long, heartfelt letter to their child — the kind they compose and recompose in their head for weeks before finally sitting down to write — is writing from necessity.

You do not have to want to be a great writer to find yourself compelled. You only have to be human enough to have something in you that needs a shape.

IV. Toni Morrison — Writing the Book That Needs to Exist

Toni Morrison’s most famous piece of writing advice fits on a single line:

“If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Like all great aphorisms, this one multiplies in meaning the longer you sit with it. On the surface, it is simple practical advice: fill the gap. But underneath, it contains a complete philosophy of why writing matters.

Morrison began writing fiction because, as an editor at Random House in the 1960s and early 1970s, she kept looking for books that spoke to the experience of Black American life — books that did not write to a white audience, that did not explain or translate or apologize, that simply inhabited the full interior life of Black women and men with the same unselfconscious authority with which white literature inhabited the interior life of white characters. Those books did not yet exist in sufficient number. So she wrote them.

This is the highest form of necessity: not just I must write because I need to express myself, but this work must exist in the world because its absence is a kind of poverty. Morrison understood that literature is not decoration — it is how a culture knows itself, how it preserves and transmits its experience across generations, how it argues about what it values. A gap in the literature is a gap in the culture’s self-knowledge.

Morrison was also clear-eyed about the difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises. If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do what’s honest, not what pays.

This distinction — writing for life rather than for a living — is the key that unlocks the practice for non-professional writers. Most people will never be paid to write. But everyone has a life worth writing about. Everyone has, in Morrison’s sense, a book that needs to exist — even if that book is a private journal no one else will ever read, even if it is only fifty pages long, even if it sits in a drawer until you die. Its existence matters.

V. Stephen King — The Truth of the Craft

Stephen King is an author whose name has sold more than 350 million books worldwide, and he is one of the most sensible, practical, and honest people ever to write about writing. His memoir On Writing should be read by every person who has ever wanted to write, or wondered if they could.

King’s core argument is almost brutally simple: writing is about telling the truth.

Not literal truth, necessarily. King writes horror and fantasy. But emotional truth, psychological truth — the truth of how it actually feels to be in a certain kind of situation, to be a certain kind of person, to want or fear or lose something. The technical machinery of fiction — plot, character, pacing, dialogue — exists entirely in service of this truth.

He also delivers a corrective to every writer who believes they are somehow above the fundamentals: writing is not about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy.

Getting happy. This is surprisingly radical, coming from a man who built an empire writing about death and terror. But it points to something real: writing is a form of working through. You do not write about the thing you have already processed and set down. You write about the thing that still has its teeth in you — and in the writing, you begin to get free of it.

King’s practical advice is also worth naming: read a lot, write a lot. There is no other way. He recommends setting a daily word count, working without distraction, writing the first draft with the door closed (for yourself, not for an audience), and rewriting with the door open (listening to feedback, looking at the work from the outside). The fundamentals matter. Vocabulary matters. The sentence matters. Adverbs are usually a sign that you don’t trust your verbs.

But underneath all the craft advice is the same understanding that every great writer eventually arrives at: writing is not life, but it can be a way back to life.

VI. The Science of Why Writing Works

For most of literary history, the case for writing was made by writers — people with an obvious bias, people whose testimony was inevitably personal and impressionistic. Then, in 1986, a social psychologist named James Pennebaker ran an experiment that changed everything.

Pennebaker divided a group of participants into two conditions. The control group wrote about neutral, superficial topics. The experimental group was asked to write continuously for fifteen minutes a day over four days about the most traumatic or difficult experiences of their lives — to dig into the emotional truth of something they had been carrying.

The results were striking. Following the experiment, Pennebaker tracked several measurements. His most striking finding was that relative to the control group, the experimental group made significantly fewer visits to the doctor in the following months.

Writing about difficult emotional experiences did not just make people feel better psychologically. It made them physically healthier. The act of translating chaotic, unprocessed feeling into coherent language — of narrativizing experience, of finding the story in the wound — had measurable effects on the immune system, on blood pressure, on the frequency of illness.

Across over a hundred subsequent studies, the findings held and expanded. Expressive writing is beneficial for reducing anxiety, mediating symptoms of depression, and relieving post-traumatic stress, among many other documented benefits. The effect size across studies averages a consistent, replicable signal.

Pennebaker’s later analysis revealed something even more interesting about how expressive writing worked. The people who showed the greatest improvement were not necessarily those who expressed the most emotion. They were those who showed the most cognitive engagement — people who used words like “realize,” “think,” “consider,” “because,” and “reason.” These words helped the writer construct a coherent story, experience insights, and find a path forward.

This is the key mechanism: writing is not primarily cathartic. It is sense-making. The benefit comes not from venting, but from the act of building a narrative — of taking the raw, disordered material of experience and organizing it into a story with a beginning, a middle, and, crucially, a meaning.

The brain, it turns out, finds this deeply relieving. Unprocessed experiences — particularly traumatic or distressing ones — take up cognitive resources just by existing. They intrude. They loop. They keep the nervous system on alert. When you write a coherent account of the experience, you are effectively filing it — you are telling the brain’s threat-detection system that the event is understood, categorized, and does not require constant monitoring.

The research also confirms writing’s cognitive benefits. Writing can help improve memory by creating deeper connections with subject material at the neurological level. Writing might be beneficial to cognitive skills because it requires focusing of attention, planning and forethought, organization of one’s thinking. Studies show that regular writing expands working memory capacity, improves vocabulary and verbal fluency, and stimulates creative thinking. Linguist Walter Ong observed that writing is necessary to help the human mind achieve its full potential — that without the practice of writing, certain forms of complex, extended, organized thought are simply not accessible to us.

The neuroscience confirms what writers have always sensed: writing is thinking. Not merely the recording of thoughts, but their formation.

VII. Why Writing Is a Moral Practice

There is a lesser-known dimension to the case for writing, one that requires saying something unfashionable in an age that prizes efficiency: writing makes you a better person.

Not in the vague self-improvement sense. In the specific sense that the act of writing seriously — honestly, carefully, with attention to what you actually think and feel rather than what you are supposed to think and feel — requires and develops a suite of virtues that are genuinely hard to come by.

Attention. You cannot write well about something you have not looked at carefully. Every experienced writer knows the hunger for the specific detail — the right word, the exact quality of a particular kind of light, the precise feeling in the chest at a moment of loss or joy. This hunger, practiced over time, becomes a way of moving through the world — a disposition to actually look at experience rather than sliding through it on autopilot.

Annie Dillard, whose The Writing Life remains one of the most demanding and beautiful meditations on what the craft requires, understood this. The writer’s job is to notice, to pursue the specific, to resist the blurring generalities that usually pass for thought.

Honesty. Writing the truth is uncomfortable. The sentence that actually captures what you think or feel or believe — rather than what you wish you thought or felt or believed — requires a kind of courage. You have to be willing to put down a sentence and then actually look at it. When you do, you often discover that you believe something more complicated, more embarrassing, more morally ambiguous than you thought. Good writing does not let you hide from this. It forces a reckoning.

Flaubert observed that the art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. This is exactly right, and it is why writing is an uncomfortable moral practice: it tends to reveal that what you actually believe is more interesting, more contradictory, and more difficult than what you claimed to believe.

Empathy. To write a character — even a fictional one, even a brief sketch, even a villain — you have to inhabit them. You have to understand what the world looks like from inside their particular body, history, and psychology. This is not a trivial exercise. It is the same cognitive and emotional movement that underlies moral imagination — the capacity to understand that other people’s inner lives are as real, as complex, and as ungovernable as your own.

Toni Morrison built her entire literary project on this. She wrote characters whose interiority had been systematically denied by the dominant culture. She wrote Black women with full inner lives, contradictions, desires, and dignities. She wrote not for a white audience that needed to be educated about Black experience, but for a Black audience that needed to see its experience taken seriously. The act of writing, she understood, is itself an act of recognition — you are saying, this experience matters enough to be written down, this person matters enough to be given a fully inhabited perspective.

VIII. On the Fear — And Why It Doesn’t Matter

Here is what almost everyone who has ever wanted to write but hasn’t will tell you: I’m afraid I’m not good enough.

It is the most common sentence in the world of unwritten writing, and it is almost always a symptom of a misunderstanding about what writing is for.

If writing is for publication — for an audience, for literary prizes, for a place on the shelf — then yes, the question of quality is relevant. Most people will not be published novelists. This is true. The market for published work is real and limited and fiercely competitive.

But this framing misses almost everything important.

Ursula K. Le Guin — who published dozens of novels and story collections and became one of the most beloved speculative fiction writers in the English language — had this to say about writing: “But when people say, did you always want to be a writer? I have to say no! I always was a writer.” She was a writer before she published a word. She was a writer because she wrote. The publication came later. The writing came first, and it was the writing itself that mattered.

Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, her generous and funny and essential guide to writing, offers the concept of the “shitty first draft” — the permission to write badly, to say the wrong thing, to be incoherent and excessive and repetitive, to get the mess out onto the page so that you can see it clearly enough to begin to shape it. The first draft is for you, not for an audience. It is the conversation you have with yourself before you are ready to talk to anyone else. Its quality is irrelevant. Its honesty is everything.

Maya Angelou understood this. She didn’t mind writing badly for a couple of days, knowing she could fix it — and fix it again and again and again, and it would be better. The bad writing was not failure. It was the necessary stage that preceded the good writing. You cannot skip it. You can only pass through it.

King put up his first rejection slips on a nail in his childhood bedroom. When the weight of rejections pulled the nail out of the wall, he replaced it with a spike. He kept writing. Every writer you have ever loved — every book that has changed your life — was written by someone who sat down knowing they might fail, and wrote anyway.

This is the only available courage. Not the courage of certainty — no one has that. The courage of beginning.

IX. Why You Should Write — Even If You’re Not a Writer

I want to make the argument directly now, without metaphor or qualification: you should write. Not if you want to be a writer. Just because you are a person alive in the world.

Here is what the evidence — literary and scientific, ancient and contemporary — says about what writing does.

Writing teaches you what you think. The most common experience of serious writing is the discovery that your actual view on something is quite different from the view you thought you held. This is not embarrassing. It is the whole point. Didion’s formula — I write to find out what I think — is not a writer’s quirk. It is a description of a cognitive process available to anyone. If you are not writing regularly, there is a substantial portion of your inner life that remains unexamined — operating below the surface, influencing your decisions and feelings without your awareness.

Writing processes experience. Pennebaker’s research is extensive enough to be considered settled science at this point: writing about difficult experiences is consistently associated with improved physical and psychological health. The mechanism — constructing a coherent narrative from chaotic experience — is available to everyone who can hold a pen or type on a keyboard. It does not require talent. It requires only the willingness to sit with something uncomfortable long enough to write about it.

Writing clarifies what matters. The act of putting something into words forces a kind of prioritization. When you write about your day, your year, your decade, you discover what you actually remember — which is another way of saying what actually matters to you. People who journal consistently over long periods report that the journals become a kind of autobiography they did not know they were writing — a record not just of events but of the evolution of a self, of the slow accumulation of who you became and why.

Writing connects you to others. Even if you never share a word you write, the practice of articulating your experience will make you better at communicating it — more precise, more honest, more capable of finding the language for things that usually remain stubbornly inarticulate. Relationships are built on this: the capacity to tell someone, accurately, what is happening inside you.

And if you do share what you write — if you send it to a friend, post it on a blog, submit it to a publication — the connection can be startling. People read something honest about an experience they have had but never found words for, and they feel seen. This is one of writing’s oldest and strangest powers: the more specific and personal and honest you are, the more universal you become. The writer who tells the truth about their particular grief reaches every person who has grieved. The writer who describes their specific confusion reaches every person who has been confused. Generality distances. Specificity connects.

Writing preserves what would otherwise be lost. You are the only person who will ever see the world from exactly where you are standing — with your particular combination of experiences, relationships, losses, joys, and ways of understanding. When you die, that perspective is gone. Writing is the only technology that can preserve it. Not perfectly. Not completely. But enough.

Your ordinary life — your observations about the city you live in, the relationship you have with your parents, the way you felt during the years when everything seemed uncertain, the small rituals that have structured your weeks — is of more historical and personal value than you probably believe. Future versions of your family, and future strangers reading archives, will understand their world better for knowing how yours felt from the inside.

X. The Practice — Where to Begin

So: where does someone who wants to start actually start?

The answer, universally agreed upon by every great writer who has addressed the question, is: you start now, and you start small.

A daily writing practice does not need to be long. It does not need to be literary. It does not need to be shared. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way recommends three pages written longhand each morning — stream of consciousness, unedited, uncensored. King recommends a thousand words a day, six days a week, when you are working on a project. Pennebaker’s expressive writing protocol is fifteen minutes a day for four days. Any of these is a beginning.

What matters is not the quantity but the regularity. Writing is a practice in the same sense that meditation or exercise is a practice — something that accumulates over time, that builds a capacity that does not exist without it. The person who writes every day for five years has access to a kind of mental and emotional clarity that is genuinely difficult to develop any other way.

A few things that actually help:

Write by hand sometimes. The research suggests that handwriting activates the brain differently than typing — more slowly, more deliberately, engaging memory and motor processing in ways that reinforce learning and the formation of coherent narrative. There is also something about the irreversibility of ink that is useful: you cannot delete a sentence you have written by hand as easily as you can a sentence you have typed, which means you are more likely to commit to a thought, to follow it somewhere, before abandoning it.

Write about what disturbs you. Not what interests you abstractly. What actually disturbs you — what keeps you up at night, what you find yourself avoiding, what sits at the edge of your thoughts and will not quite come into focus. This is where the most important writing waits. Rilke was right: the things you cannot yet say are precisely the things most worth trying to say.

Write without an audience. At least at first. Didion’s instruction to write with the door closed comes from the same instinct. The inner critic — the voice that tells you you are not good enough, that someone is watching, that this is embarrassing — is quieted, at least partly, when you remind yourself that you are the only audience. What would you say if no one could ever read it? Start there.

Read widely and hungrily. Every writer who has addressed this subject agrees: you cannot become a better writer without reading. Not because reading teaches you rules, but because it teaches you what is possible — it shows you the full range of what sentences can do, what stories can hold, what honesty looks like when it has been given its best possible shape. You read and something loosens in you, some assumption about what writing is relaxes, and suddenly you can hear the sentence you actually want to write instead of the safe one you were about to produce.

XI. The Last Reason

I have given you the literary reasons (Orwell’s motives, Didion’s excavation, Rilke’s necessity, Morrison’s gap, King’s truth). I have given you the scientific reasons (Pennebaker’s health benefits, the cognitive research, the neuroscience of narrative). I have given you the moral reasons (attention, honesty, empathy). I have given you the practical reasons (clarity of thought, preservation of experience, connection with others).

Let me give you one more, which is harder to categorize.

Writing is one of the few activities available to human beings that is purely and entirely your own. When you write — really write, honestly and without performance — you are alone with the full complexity of your mind and life in a way that is rare and, I think, essential to a kind of sanity that is hard to maintain otherwise. We live in a world of almost continuous noise, almost continuous demand for attention and response, almost continuous performance of self. Writing — the private kind, the exploratory kind, the kind no one sees — is a space outside of all of that.

It is where you get to be confused without consequence. Where you get to contradict yourself, change your mind, discover that you are not who you thought you were, and begin the process of becoming who you actually want to be. Where you get to grieve properly and think clearly and notice what you usually miss and say what you are usually too afraid to say.

Orwell wrote, near the end of his life, that writing a book was like a long bout of some painful illness. He wrote it anyway. Didion wrote through anxiety and uncertainty and loss. Morrison wrote while raising children alone and working full-time as an editor. King wrote on his lunch break in a laundry where his job was to wash blood and maggots off restaurant linens.

None of them wrote because it was easy. All of them wrote because they did not know, in the end, how to be themselves without it.

You do not have to publish a word. You do not have to share a sentence. You do not have to improve. You only have to begin — to find a quiet hour and a blank page and the willingness to write down, as honestly as you can, one true sentence about what your life looks like from the inside.

That sentence already wants to exist.

Write it.