I love this description on why some people write:
“The spurs to writing are infinite, as you must know. Some people write as a protest against the imperfect world and all they’ve suffered in it. Some people write out of love of the world – poets chiefly – praising it. (Do you know the poem of Elinor Wylie on the earth, ending up “I kiss the scars upon its face”?). Katherine Mansfield wrote driven by illness and death, feeling she must capture life in writing. Proust wrote in the same way to recapture the past. (Everything changes, everything passes – except art.) Chekhov and Tolstoy wrote out of love and compassion for human beings (Chekhov was a compassionate doctor as well – Tolstoy, a reformer), etc.
I think, too, that women write for different reasons than men.
It seems to me that some women often write out of an excess of the mother instinct in them. They write to give more milk-of-human kindness and more wisdom and more insights than their children can take. They write for other “children” in the world. (And I don’t mean literal “children” waiting for child stories.) They have garnered a certain amount of honey in their hives – more than enough for the family around them – and they must go on giving it to the wider world because it is in their nature to give.
I think one must distinguish between the incidental accidents that turn one to writing and the deep inner spurs to writing that lead one on, no matter what the accidents of one’s life.
I would write even if I published nothing. I wrote for years in diaries and notebooks and poems before I published anything. I believe I write to analyze, clarify, understand and perceive life. I write in order to see more clearly. If I did not write, I would be blind and deaf – as well as dumb. It is my lens through which to see myself and the world”.
Writing is a glass bottomed bucket through which one looks to the still world below the ruffled surface of the waves. It is a blind man’s stick with which I tap my way along the pavement. It is also my keel, which keeps me steady in choppy waters and gives me direction”.
So well said Ann Morrow Lindbergh. If you were still on this planet, I would definitely want to meet you.