Why does a writer write?

Why does a writer write? I have been pondering over this question for quite some time now. Does he write because he wants to or does he write because he has to? Do you know what happens when you choke on a piece of bread? When it gets stuck in the throat? You drink water to gulp it in or you try to spit it out. Either way, you try to get rid of what chokes you. And you feel relieved when you do. A writer is the one who has to do both of these things, because none of them, whether alone or collectively can bring him relief. He needs to gulp it in and spit it out; gulp it in and spit it out; and the cycle continues. The cycle continues so that he can keep the choking at bay. He still chokes, every day, but just tries to keep it at bay so that it doesn’t kill him.

But what is it that he chokes on? What is it that kills him? It is the same thing that kills all of us- Pain. Except for the fact that some choose to live with it and others try to evade it by surrendering themselves to the pursuit of happiness. But I question, why are they pursuing it? Why do they need to pursue it? Is it not something that naturally comes to them, like breathing? Like there is a class that pursues happiness, there is a class that befriends pain. They are writers. The thing that chokes them in the throat is pain, some of which, they gulp in, the rest, they spit out. Writers don’t write because they want to or because they have to. They write because they need to live; they need to survive.

They aren’t some benevolent magicians meant to save the world through their works. They are humans, who are just as fallible as the rest and are trying only to save themselves. They do not necessarily need to be polite, humble and generous people who are meant to be empathetic towards others. They can be rude, arrogant, angry creatures trying to battle these issues within themselves; or maybe these issues are what propel them to write. Maybe their inability to maintain calm in the state of chaos and loss thus incurred and the pain thus suffered is what they want to write about. They want to write down what they couldn’t speak and also what they did and why they did so. Why did the past creep in then and made them who they are? Why and how have they been moulded into someone they never were?

These are the questions that they can either choose to gulp down and store in some corner of their hearts as pain’s indifferent token, or spit the answers out on a blank canvas with such intensity and ferocity that matches the magnitude of the glitch in their throats. They keep the bug from troubling them for as long as the time that the bug takes to replenish itself, for the world feeds it a lot of fodder. It is the reason why a writer observes the dog limping, the child crying, the old man’s eyes, and a common man’s cries. He observes the world around him and feels sad. He finds that the others are no different. He finds that others are there, right in the eye of the storm; and he finds that they have no means to fight back. They are there as if they have been destined to be there. It makes him sadder.

But why does he write then? Does it help him? Or does it help them? Does it change the world? I don’t know. But what it surely does is that it changes him. The fits of the former self do come back to haunt him, but more or less he comes out reformed; not perfect, but reformed. He sees the bitterness around, and realizes that a moment of kindness even if that goes against his comforts and even if it doesn’t bring him any sort of relief, can do wonders. They feel good for the person, but they feel numb within. It is a strange kind of feeling that perhaps they themselves cannot explain. A writer doesn’t know what he wants when he writes, he doesn’t know how would it help him, or how would it help the world. He just writes; plain and simple. He is a wanderer, roaming around, observing the world, carrying another one within him, and trying to bring the two at par. All of this for what, he doesn’t know!