“Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”

― Kahlil Gibran

Why do we write? Why do we, as writers, create? To understand this we may need to delve into the ontology of our audience. Putting it more audaciously –  it is perhaps the audience that creates a writer. Orwell listed his motivation to write in a 1946 autobiographical essay.  He begins the quartet of his reasons with sheer egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm. Esquirol, the French psychiatrist,  had coined a term, around a century before Orwell, capturing these two impulses within a single word – Graphomania. This term was redeemed from being a mere psychological malady and was coronated  as a beautiful existential vice by Kundera. He philosophized  on this condition with some clinical insights.  “The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”  While he contends that it is a basic human need to seek an audience, he does not say whether it is a special audience that we seek. However, there are good reasons to believe that it is. And if we approach the problem from this  frame of reference, the answer to “Why do we write?” will perhaps come once we address an even more urgent question – why do we love?

“The world is full of paper. Write to me.” – Agha Shahid Ali