"Why I Write" by Joan Didion

“Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.”

Didion is not the first writer I have seen say something like this. Like Didion did not know who the narrator would be for her novel, Jay Asher has said that he didn’t know who the speaker was going to be in his debut novel, Thirteen Reasons Why (an interview in the bonus material of the book). He had to see where the story took him and then revise. It turned out that the book goes between the speaker, Clay Jensen, and the audio of the tapes Hannah recorded for him and 12 others. Laurie Halse Anderson said about her popular book Speak (in an interview in the platinum edition) that she did not know in the beginning where the story was going. She said that the girl, Melinda, came to her in a nightmare and was trying to tell her something and she just had to write it down. Just as the reader doesn’t know until later in the book that Melinda had been raped, Anderson said she didn’t either.

I think it is really stirring, these author’s pull to write. They have images and voices in their heads that they can only get out through writing. This phenomena, of course, does not apply to all writers or all forms of writing, but is interesting.

I also thought it was interesting how Didion said that she couldn’t think. She said that she focused on concrete images or the “peripheral.” It’s strange to think that someone who is clearly intelligent, having written multiple novels, feels that she fails to think because she does so differently than others.