Back in college, I had to read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. It is, I think, a valuable text that all writers should read at least once, even though I fundamentally disagree with a lot of what Rilke has to say in it. One line in particular has served as a mental sparring partner for me for years: In the first letter, he writes, “if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all.”
I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not actually sure I like writing.
Sometimes I love it, when the muse hits just right and the sentences are flowing and the foreshadowing seems to write itself. Frequently I find it tedious, another task on the unending to-do list, another little piece of the world demanding my focus and attention. I have enough creative hobbies that I could easily live without writing, though at this point I’ve invested too much time and effort into it to not get some sort of ROI.
Often, though, I’ve found that whether or not I like writing is a significantly less relevant question than why I sit down to write in the first place.
Many of my writer friends and the authors I follow seem to be Rilke’s ideal writer: they have a story in their heart and a burning need to let it out, regardless who reads it (or doesn’t). They must write; it’s a cornerstone of their identity, a place of peace and creative expression for them, as much a fundamental part of themselves as their beating heart.
I have never once in my life felt that. By turns, I’ve written to amuse my friends, I’ve written to explore an idea I wanted to examine or a feeling I wanted to exorcise, I’ve written to improve my writing craft, I’ve written to see if I could pull off a challenging concept, I’ve written because I was bored and felt a creative itch and didn’t want to clean glitter glue off my kitchen table later.
I enjoy a well-crafted story, and I enjoy the puzzle of crafting one well. But it is, ultimately, a product to me. There are pieces of myself in everything I’ve written, but writing itself has never been the end goal. The journey is not the destination. It wasn’t just about the friends we made along the way.
I don’t write to write, I write to be read.
For the longest time, thanks to that Rilke quote, thanks to a few capital-A artistes I befriended and looked up to, I thought this somehow made me an imposter, a lesser writer, a sell-out, a fraud. But I’ve recently come to think of it as my strength, for one simple reason: Books are meant to be read.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a book is written and no one reads it, does it say anything at all?
My taste in books runs the gamut from genre to literary, from highbrow to low, from serious to silly to artsy to absurd, from dense character-driven doorstoppers to thinkpieces to fluffy beach reads. I love and hate books equally across categories. My friends have largely stopped recommending me books because they can’t predict what I’ll like; heck, even I can’t always predict what I’ll like. But there’s one unifying factor in all the books that I love: They make me feel less alone in the world.
A great book strikes a chord with my soul. It resonates through my entire being. Changes me from the inside out. Reading it feels like finding a part of myself that I didn’t even know was missing, like finding a friend when I thought I was the only one around. C.S. Lewis wrote that friendship is born at the moment one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” A good book does that too. A book can provide solace, understanding, compassion, it can remind you that someone else has thought what you’ve thought and felt what you’ve felt, no matter how alone you might feel at that moment.
And that is why I write.
I don’t write because I must, nor because my heart might cease to beat if I stopped, nor because I have a story inside me clawing and begging to get out. I write because at times I have felt alone in my life, even while surrounded by people who love me, and if my words can resonate with at least one person, can fill a crack in their soul, can stick with them, can make them feel a little less alone, I will have done a worthwhile thing.
Stay excellent,
Kristen Sommers
XOXO
Kristen Sommers 