Why do we write?

I’m reading Peter Straub’s novel Mr. X right now, as I go about the business of starting my own new novel. Like almost all Straub’s work, Mr. X is a long and voluble book, rich with secondary characters and back story and smaller tales that eddy within the larger current of the story. Straub’s performance is complex and risky, and I find his work—in combination with old interviews I’ve found online where he talks about the origin of different projects—to be a tremendous confidence booster as I go about my own work.

For me the process of starting a new book is a lot like exploring an old dark house full of intriguing but very dangerous possibilities. I go inside when I can no longer resist, when my curiosity about what’s inside overcomes my apprehension of floors that might collapse under my weight, blind hallways that lead nowhere, wiring that might electrocute me if I get too close. Or I might just lose all momentum, which is its own kind of trap. Particularly when I get home at night and it’s late and my energy level is at its lowest point. With my current book, a non-paranormal novel, I’ve been teetering perilously close to giving up completely.

But I hear music in Straub’s work, and the measured encouraging voice of a friend. He conveys a commitment to the craft that almost feels involuntary, and that inspires me, even when I’m tired and not in the mood to put words on the screen. On one occasion he talks about the origin of The Hellfire Club, how he spent over a year on a book trying to make it work before discovering the character whose personality holds the key to the story. That sense of mission, combined with the sheer originality of the language and the story’s breadth of scope, drives me back to my computer night after night. Even if I’m only able to commit an hour to the book, a page or two, it satisfies that part of me that allows me to go on with whatever’s left of the evening.

In one interview Straub describes a late ‘50s performance by Billie Holiday on CBS’s The Sound of Jazz. When I watch Billie Holiday’s reaction to Lester Young’s saxophone solo, I do get a sense of how the two parts of the writer’s mind may work, under certain circumstances, and the satisfaction emanating from that relationship.


Why do we write? To find out what happens next. If you think about the writer’s performance as a dialogue with himself, creating an itch and then scratching it, this call-and-response technique can potentially sustain the entire weight and ligature of the whole book, long or short. To be successful, the writing, then, has to be doubly good—it has to engage the writer enough to compel him forward through the process, and answer the questions it asks along the way in a satisfactory manner. Done right, all the pleasure, the joy of writing comes off of this dialogue like steam off a hotplate.