Why Write?

Today is World Book Day. If you haven't heard of it, it's a worldwide celebration of reading and all things related, ie books, authors etc. 

I'm all for celebrations. My good friend and narcissistic publisher Edie Tor is marking the day by having the complete works of ELJames tattooed on her body, but I wouldn't go that far. For one thing, ELJames is hardly my benchmark for literary merit*, even if she has sold cartloads of copies. And for another, I come out in hives when I put transfers on my wrist, so tattoos might just be fatal.

I'm all for reading, however. Far better to stimulate the imagination than pig out on junk telly. And with the advent of ebooks and KSP, the choice of reading material has never been wider. Which begs the question: With an ocean of books out there, should anyone be bothering to write more?

Of course "should" never enters into it, does it? If people feel the need to do something, for whatever obscure and indefinable reason, they tend to just go ahead and do it. And it doesn't really matter how loony it seems to everyone else. Witness the number who die trying to be the zillionth climber of Everest, or walking to the North Pole, or pole-vaulting across the Grand Canyon. The rest of us shake our heads on the sidelines, but it never deterred anyone.

So why do we write? What is the need we're trying to fulfil when we torture ourselves with rewrites, critiques, rejection letters and bad reviews? If it's for glory or riches, we're setting ourselves up for disappointment. Granted a few do win the jackpot - it's an analogy worth emphasising because you're about as likely to win the lottery than hit Harry Potter levels of riches - but the vast majority never see enough to cover the cost of pens and ink. 

But isn't art its own reward? Someone once said art is the purpose of life, and therefore no one should expect to earn from it. Like the poor sod trying to pogo across the Sahara it's one little contribution to the tapestry of life, a little coloured fleck in the midst of all that rich imagery. It's an achievement, of sorts. It's something out of nothing. And that's always worth the effort.

Happy World Book Day! 



*Is she anybody's?

Why Write?

Is it a dumb question? I've seen all sorts of answers put forward ranging from the tortured artist who must write or die to the weary hack churning out another article to pay the rent. But money and artistic glory apart, why do we choose to express ourselves this way? Is writing necessary? If all the fiction ever written disappeared tomorrow would it make a difference?

Everybody has their own reasons for wanting to write, I guess. But judging by the sheer numbers of wannabe authors in the world there is clearly a deep-seated drive to commit ourselves to paper. However unique we like to think we are, writing is something many many people aspire to.

Story telling is as old as humanity and was the original entertainment. Sitting around the camp fires prehistoric people regaled each other with myths and legends, passed down from generation to generation. We loved to tell, and we loved to listen. Surely novel writing is simply another form of this, taken to a more refined form.

I think it's connecting with others, in a strangely paradoxical way, considering it involves long lonely hours in the company of fictional creations. It is a distilled shout from the hilltop, amplified through the pages of a book to reach hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of listeners. Someone once said, we read to feel we are not alone. Perhaps we write for that reason too.

How Well Read Are You?

Following on from L'Aussie Writing, I am duplicating the list of books of which the BBC reckons most people have only read 6 out of the hundred. If you want to accept the challenge, copy and paste this list into your blog and link back to here.

Instructions:


• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible - (yes, really!)
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

*Last book is missing. My suggestion for book #100: Rape, A Love Story - Joyce Carol Oates
What book would you suggest?

So that gives me a total of 22. Hmm...not bad. Better than 6 anyway!

How did you score?