Why write? That is, with what intention or goal?
For let me examine the real motivation behind my prose. It is to get attention. Look at me. Notice me! Love me—subconscious urges that writing has not been able to fulfill. Instead, I have created resentments, misinterpretations, and painted a picture of me as a womanizer, user, and superficial money slog. Since writing has failed to give me sublimation, this motivation no longer holds.
Writing has also been a comfortable forum in which to say to those I love how I truly feel, to express my viewpoint of the artificiality before us. So writing has allowed me to ask the question: Do you accept my viewpoint? Do you accept me for who I truly am behind the pretending-to-accept-things-as-they-are exterior? Now that I no longer have cement throat preventing me from speaking freely of the sentiments which skim across the waters of my mind, now that I say how I feel and say what I want, writing no longer fulfills this role either.
Which brings back again the question, why write? Yes, I concede that actions are the only things that matter in the end because they produce consequences whereas thoughts do not, by themselves purely, create tangible results. So, yes, I agree that the intention behind writing doesn’t truly matter. All it matters is that one writes.
Still…one needs to rationalize his actions and tuck them away neatly in the shoe boxes of his mind. Writing for my own therapeutic purposes or for the sake of the art, in my view alone, is masturbatory because it does not lead to action. But if I write for others, and in my self-congratulatory fantasy, that others may learn from it, choose to change behavior as a result of it, then my writing will move beyond intention into the realm of valuable contribution.
