It is an age old question; what drives a person to write?
For me, the long history of writing began in caves when our ancestors began to scrawl on the walls.
There was a primal desire to communicate to others what is in our minds.
Cave art as a form of written communication is one of the cornerstones of the complicated multitudes of the written form today.
Cave dwellers depicted what was relevant to them at the time. Those of us that have been privileged to see first hand the incredible beauty of those works in situ, will most certainly attest to the fact that the message imbued on the rocks still speaks to us today, even after many thousands of years. There is something poignant and quintessentially human in those messages. Even after all this time and evolution, they are able to convey the message intended.
This is what has meaning to us. This is the world as we see it.
The fact that even thousands of years ago, people were seeking out ways to pass on first hand knowledge to others in a manner other than verbal, should give a clue to another reason as to why people write.
I believe there is another primal desire to be found in the written word. The basic desire to leave behind a part of ourselves, a message, to others. After we are dead and buried, how does the life long experience of a person remain? Before the written word it was a part of the daily ritual of many peoples to tell stories. The shaman, the witch doctor, the story teller are all examples of this in action. The stories of the people themselves and the information that will ensure their continuation, was passed down to the younger generations.
With the evolution of the written word, the ease of passing down such relevant information was transformed. As humanity mechanised and changed socially, from cave, to farm, to city; the reasons for writing changed too. It was no longer used exclusively for passing on the accumulated knowledge of a people, or to record significant events, no. Humanity began to do a bit of navel gazing!
What I mean by that is, humanity as a species was able to use the written word to commence the inspiring art of social commentary. We began to question who we were and why. Exciting times.
As we moved into more recent centuries, people like Chaucer and Shakespeare offered up incredibly exciting and sometimes thinly veiled commentary on the issues and leaders of the time. They investigated the fabric of social structure and the contradictions to be found there.
Even things like the humble nursery rhyme, perhaps controversial at the time, offer an insight into the use of the written word as social commentary. Some may not know that simple nursery rhymes like 'Rock a bye baby, on the tree top' was in fact a poke at the royal family of the day. It was speculated by some that the royal offspring was in fact not fathered by the King. The lines 'when the bough breaks the cradle will fall' is a direct statement on the family tree of the royal family, and the fact that the offspring would fall when the secret was revealed.
More recently than that we have had books like 1984, and any and all of Asimov, Heinlein, the Bronte sisters, DH Lawrence and a litany of others too, who have something to say about the world around them and the social constructs thereof.
Today, we enjoy a vast extension of those early days of navel gazing.
No longer are our social comments hidden behind thinly veiled sing-songs, amusing or entertaining plays and poems, or even bolder comments on society such as George Orwell. Today we are flooded with news articles and social media opinions, much of which makes no effort whatsoever to pull the punch when spreading the word!
What that has offered us, in this century, more than any that has come before, is the freedom to put pen to paper, say something without fear of repercussions, and to write for the love of it.
Writing in the 21st Century is a brave new world. Anyone who has something to say can send it out to the world in the form of any number of social media options....such as blogging!
There are dangers to be found in this, as Gay Talese (author of A Writers Life) so eloquently put it.
We are at risk of "Googling our way through life"
But that is a topic of another blog post I think! Back to writing....
My journey into writing began long ago, with a love of reading.
Further to that, it was a conversation I had years ago with my beautiful Grandmother, who is being awarded the Order of Australia Medal next month for her tireless work improving the rights of women and men in the workplace, over many, many decades. Story telling is still a big part of how our species passes down life experience!
I had just given birth to twins, my first children and a bit of a surprise to say the least! My grandmother was telling me about her experiences as a new mother, and what it was like in the war days with rations and so forth and most of the men off shore fighting a war a world away. We compared the differences in technology; a copper versus a washing machine, a wood-fired stove versus a standard electric/gas stove and oven.
But more than that, we discussed the social changes that came after the war too.
She imparted a simple recollection of what it was like in those war days when the post man was due to arrive.
Sounds simple doesn't it?
Not really.
You see the women who remained behind whilst their men fought the war were terrified of the post man.
Why?
Because he was the one who delivered
that letter. The one informing them that their husband/brother/father was dead. Many went through it again with their sons in Vietnam and shamefully for humanity, many other wars too.
She recalled how the women on the street would band together so as not to be alone when the dreaded letter arrived. Offering comfort and true understanding amidst the desperation of grief. It must be remembered that in those days there was no "social welfare" that cared for women who lost the sole income earner in the family. That letter meant not just the loss of a husband and father, but often a loss of the family home and worse.
Further to this deeply personal experience, she shared with me how she misses an artful and interesting letter from a friend.
People still wrote to each other in those days, she sighed. An email can hardly compare to the personal touch of a hand written letter. A text message, far, far less by comparison.
It began a wonderful chain of thought for me. The art of writing a letter.
Some of us may be old enough to remember the days of pen-pals as a kid and how exciting it was to run out to the post man with a letter from across the globe. Sadly, I must agree with my grandmother, it is an art that is being lost.
It was that conversation many years ago that started me thinking about writing and what motivates people to do it. More than that, all these years later, she still motivates me to write in a way that is true to me.
She says,
a letter should be genuine, honest and authentic.
Truer words were never spoken.
Take a look at the picture below. The people who made it had a message.
It was genuine, authentic and honest. Something we as writers should strive for in every word we commit to paper. It doesn't matter what you are writing, it should always come from the heart.
We have a legacy from those days to live up to. In my humble opinion, little has changed since cave walls regarding the reasons for writing. The innate need to understand and to be understood is at the essence of the unswerving motivation to write.
I think they have achieved it. In no small part their efforts to communicate through a written form has brought them nothing short of immortality. Their fist steps toward a truly non verbal form of language resonates to this day in the drive and motivations of writers.
We may not know their names, but the message to their descendants remains...
I am aware of my own existence. I am a part of this world. This will remain long after I am gone.
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Footnote:
Before anyone gets into a tizz about art being art and writing being writing...
I am fully aware that cave art is viewed as art and not writing. I wanted to explore the idea that cave art was indeed a precursor to writing. Without these first depictions, pictographic representations would not have evolved, and from there the first
phonetic pictorial representations of objects, which led to the first "true" words. Thanks :)
