Why I Write: Part 1

I'm not really sure how many installments it's going to take to explain why I like to write so much. I know there will be at least one more post about why I write fiction, and another one about writing nonfiction. Clearly planning is not my forte as a blogger. But after you read today's post, I hope you will understand why I'm not sure how long it will take to explain why I like to write.

Here's why I write. 

My brain feels scattered, and writing is my way of organizing all my mental objects. Thoughts that that are crowding around in my mind move too fast and are too tangled and interconnected for me to ever make sense of them; they exist as a collection of images, feelings, words, memories, and information. They are not arranged linearly or pictorially or in categories. As far as I can tell, they are not arranged at all, and try as I might, I cannot organize them by just sitting around and thinking. 

This means that processing information, or processing my thoughts and feelings, is difficult for me. So, I write to process. Otherwise, all those thoughts are lying around in pieces, never quite connecting and forming a unified whole. Unlike linear and logical people, I have no innate mental schema for organizing thoughts. I have one friend who only wrote one draft of every paper she wrote in college (and she got good grades). That’s right: she could formulate an argument and come to a conclusion all in one draft, writing her paper from start to finish, from introduction to logical conclusion. I, however, cannot tell a story from beginning to end. My brain doesn’t work that way. When I start writing, I have some idea of what I'll include and where I'm going, but it's never complete. I have to edit and reorganize as I go.

Here’s how I picture it: Some people's brains are like a new 64-pack of crayons, with each crayon of a particular color representing a complete idea and its sub-ideas. These people's thoughts are neatly separated, whole entities, still in their fresh wrappers, and sorted by color from lightest to darkest. These are the people who are logical and linear; they have administrative and organizational gifts. When they encounter new information, it's often easy for them to know where that new information fits in. Simple! Just find the crayons of most similar color and make a space for the new crayon in between.

On the other hand, my mind is like a 64-pack where all of the crayons have been broken into multiple pieces. In fact, the pack itself was destroyed and thrown away long ago, so now all the crayons are kept in a big jumble in a plastic bowl, and there are no wrappers to speak of. If two pieces of the same color happen to be touching, it’s only by coincidence. When thoughts get long and complicated, there's no way I can find any kind of conclusion, because I don't know where all the pieces of that crayon are. Throw in new information, and it just sits in the bowl on top of the pile.

Writing for me is like sorting the big bowl of crayons according to color. I don’t pick through the crayons and try to find every single piece of red all at once, moving on to every single piece of blue, pink, etc. Writing is the process of getting all the crayons out of the bowl and sorting through them so I can put like colors together. It allows me to lay everything out at once that seems to be even remotely related, then select the truly relevant details and thoughts. I can piece them together and see what kind of whole they form (putting the same color pieces together to make a crayon), and I can throw the irrelevant pieces (the other colors) back in the bowl. When I write, it puts the words, images, feelings, memories outside of me and allows me to organize them.

This is my brain. This is why I need to write.