Why Write? [Part Two]

As I said last week, I think we write to share our humanity with one another. And I think that’s a very good thing. But I also think we shouldn’t be too lofty about it. You don’t have to write about humanity, per se, you just have to portray it, for good or bad, for pathos or humor.

There are all kinds of writing. I know writers who are fantastic at comedy who wish they could write drama—so they devote years to trying to crack the drama genre and write something important. I understand where they’re coming from, because there are often different levels of prestige attached to different kinds of writing. For a long time, being a TV writer was considered less prestigious than being a feature film writer—but that’s changing big time. And in the world of fiction, being a young adult author has been seen as less prestigious than to be a writer of novels for adults—but that, too, is changing.

In the last couple of years of my mom’s life she was in an assisted living facility—it was a terrific place and she enjoyed her life there very much. But as she started to decline, the one thing that cheered her up and made her forget her failing and often painful body, was watching sitcoms. Until that point I hadn’t thought much of the average sitcom—and though I had written several spec sitcoms when I was first starting out, I was glad they never launched my career and instead my career got launched in feature films. I, too, was following the then prejudice of the industry that films were more important than TV. But watching my mom respond to sitcoms, watching them take her out of herself and laugh again—I wanted to kiss the feet of every sitcom writer out there.

There are all kinds of reasons to write and we never know how what we write will touch another person—in our own time or in the future. So the important thing is to get in touch with what you really want to write, not what you think you ‘should’ write or what your parents/teachers/friends think you should write—but what you want to write.

It’s important to understand what it means to be human—and if you can do that for yourself and others, now and in the future through writing, then you need to do it. Don’t begrudge yourself the time, don’t feel you’re stealing it from something more important, because writing may be the most important thing you do in your life. So doesn’t it deserve time and care to allow you to become the writer that you could be?

Copyright © Diane Lake

13Nov16

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