The Purpose of Writing

And so you come here to see what the writer has to say. Does He have an insight in to your problem? Does he have comfort and reassurance? Are you looking for his outrage, anger, disgust to wallow in for your emotional pleasure?

You need to understand this, a writer is not simply a monkey pounding on keys, slapping words on a page for some external goal, like a paycheck or banging groupies. A writer is not a celebrity nor a prophet nor a prancing show animal. A writer is someone seeking to get words out of the headspace and out on to a page for reflection. The writer has a storm of concepts, idea and emotions whirling around in their brain. They manifest as glimpses of action, snatches of scenes or half formed soliloquies that sound good with in the confines of their brain space.  

 
Once out of the confines of the brain space, the words show up on a page, or a computer screen. The process of reflection starts up. Did she really mean “sexually hot for her teddy bear” or is that just a way of saying she wants to go back to the visceral enjoyment of childhood? The words are out there, on the page, sitting. They are put there by a writer who slapped the letters on a keyboard with or without the intent, innuendo, inflection, impression, comprehension of the reader. It sounded good at the time. Why do you turn away?

 It’s just an idea, unless you work for thought police who have twisted their consciousness to believe “thoughts have consequences.” Just because someone writes “Tom proudly slept twelve hours each night for the remaining sixteen weeks” doesn’t mean that they are encouraging sloth. It doesn’t mean that is a prescription for happiness through slumber. It might just be a reporting of a “fact” or a relaying of words the subject conveyed to them.  How the reader recognizes, hears or comprehends them can be very limited.

The writer is only disruptive to the barren page, putting letters, numbers, symbols and other visual markings on it to arrange their thoughts, then rearrange them and encase them in punctuation and proper emphasis markings based on a culture, maybe not the culture of the reader, or the writer.  The reader then interfaces with this mélange of visual chicanery.  It is in this transportation of idea from writer, creator, arranger  to reader, interpreter, disassembler that mental mischief, skewed perspective, predisposition, bias, ignorance or malevolent reinterpretation occurs and communication between people breaks down.

Then again, I could just be typing this to get it out of my head so I can fall asleep tonight.