Why am I writing?

Why am I writing?

Someone recently told me that there wasn’t any point in my writing down an opinion and sharing it with others if I was saying the same thing that many other people were saying. We were talking specifically about a certain opinion I had written about. But he meant opinions about anything. He was asking me what the point was of writing something down for people to read if a hundred or a thousand or a million other people had already written the same thing. Isn’t it redundant, repetitive, pointless, a waste of time and energy?

So why do I write? As we all learned in school, nothing new is ever written; everything has been written before. So why keep writing? Why do we keep repeating the words of others with just a slightly different voice, just a slightly different perspective, just a slant here, a tilt there, to make it not entirely unoriginal?

The reason I keep writing, and even write things that I know are already being written and spoken and heard is because, while everything has already been written, not everybody has already gotten it. Not every person has read every word that is out there and said, “Ah ha! I get it. I see what they were saying.” Sometimes a reader reads words and sees nothing; he sees pointless, empty, fruitless words, and so he tosses those words aside without absorbing them or digesting them in any way.

But what if that person sees a set of words and tosses it aside, and then they see another set of similar words and toss that set aside as well, and continue on and on in the same pattern, until… 

Until one writer finds just the right set of words that makes sense to that reader.

And makes the reader pause.

And think a little longer. 

And wonder. 

And ask questions. 

And maybe those words don’t change the reader’s mind. Maybe they don’t change the reader’s life. Maybe all they accomplish is to make that reader pause for just a moment before moving on. But in that instance, if I am the author of those words, and that reader has a moment of pause that he has never experienced before with a similar set of words, then I have succeeded. It was well worth the time, the energy, and the thought that I put into writing my redundant and repetitive set of words and adding them to all the rest that float through our world.

If I made someone think or laugh or question or smile or grimace or have any reaction at all by writing something down and sharing it, then I am serving my purpose as a writer, and I am serving the reader of my words. This makes me happy. This fulfills me and satisfies me. This is who I am. This is why I write.