The Scofield, Summer 2016 Issue 2.1 - Clarice Lispector, The Act of Writing

Publication details not specified. — 299 p. (In English)Why do writers write? It’s an age-old question. Long before Orhan Pamuk addressed it in his 2006 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, before George Orwell wrote his famous answer in the aptly-titled essay “Why I Write,” before Oscar Wilde danced around the issue in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, writers of all stripes have wondered why it is that we do what we do. Clarice Lispector, this issue’s spotlighted author, once wrote, “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.” Whereas Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” The answers seem truly endless. For some, it’s to change the world, to make it better. For others, there’s no want to change things at all, but merely a desire to describe them, to make them more understandable. Some have political motivations, some have philosophical motivations, some have aesthetic motivations, some have escapist motivations, and some have ambiguous motivations — many, a combination thereof. Some write to entertain, while others write to proselytize. Some write to distract, while others write to engage. Some write to give form to the chaos, while others write to give chaos to the form. Some write to ask questions, while others write to seek answers. Some write to please others, while others write to please themselves. Some write out of love, while others, as the notorious William H. Gass line goes, write because they hate. But just because none of us seem to have the same exact impetus or reason or purpose or goal for our putting pen to paper, doesn’t mean we don’t all partake in that same form of magic.