Who's It All For?
What makes a person take time out of their busy day-to-day lives to sit down and start writing?
What is that underlying motivation that pushes you to try to break through that debilitating writer’s block or to keep pouring those endless hours into that 100+ page story?
Well, I don’t have the answer…
Because for every person the answer will differ.
Writing can be a form of escapism. It can be an expression - to communicate a particular message. It can be to entertain (the writer and/or their audience). It can be to educate. Or, as is more likely the case, it is a myriad combination of all of the reasons.
For me, the starting point for writing is personal.
I write because it is an activity that I enjoy and that can be a source of fulfilment. The stories I write are ones that I find interesting, different and that excite me. And, most importantly, (and regardless of genre,) they are stories that, at least on some level, I connect to emotionally.
I will dive into this further at a later time, but I am someone who is open to stories of every variety (books, movies, etc.) . It can be a rom-com, a slasher, an existential mystery or anything in between. And it can be told in any way. A poem, a comic, a novel, a short story, and so on. What really matters to me is that there is something to connect to or enjoy from it that is greater than surface level (not to sound exceptionally pretentious…) and, ideally, it is being conveyed in an evocative or a different or original way to what’s come before.
Oftentimes, the foundations of my stories originate with a question of “Who is?” or “What if?” These may stem from personal experience or observation (e.g., my favourite activity: people watching) or taking an existing story, deconstructing it and branching it off into entirely new directions.
I’ll give a couple examples.
One: My wife used to live in a house that was converted into three apartments. Her unit was on the ground floor. In the basement and in the upper floor were two other units. In the basement unit was a man that we’ll call Frank for the sake of preserving anonymity. Frank was probably in his late forties and had lived in that basement for close to two decades. He was a rough and tumble kinda guy and he snored like a motherfucker. Next to my wife’s bed was a floor vent that happened to travel down to the basement unit somewhere evidently close to where Frank slept. Sleeping in my wife’s former bed was like sleeping with Frank. As we lay in her bed, we could literally feel the hot weight of his truncated breathing on our necks. He was right there wedged between us. That’s how loud his snoring was. It kept us (and especially my wife) up so frequently that she ended up staying at my place most of the time. At the same time, around this period of our lives, many people we knew were starting to have babies. With this new era of parenthood, came all of the corresponding trials and difficulties that quickly began enveloping every conversation we had with these friends. Foremost: parents’ lack of sleep. And so, ideas began to percolate. Frank’s incessant snoring. Babies not sleeping, causing parents not sleeping… Eventually a story began to form:
New sleep-deprived parents living in a small apartment unit atop a rambunctious slob of a man who never let them sleep at night. Until one day it all becomes too much and the parents snap…
Two: Like any well-adjusted person, I am a big fan of David Cronenberg’s films, as well as, body horror and, even more generally, simply watching movies. I have a few friends that watch movies like mosquitos get me in the summer. Absolutely non-stop. And there was a while when I similarly consumed a lot of movies (I even had an Instagram account where I reviewed movies… nerd alert). Of course, I am referring to my B.C. era here (before. children.). One day, a while back, I started tinkering with a story concept of a film-obsessed man who breaks into his colleague’s house while they are on vacation to watch movies in their home theatre. Taking advantage of this rare opportunity the man spirals down a marathon rabbit hole of movie watching, remaining in this dark, dank room consuming no food or water but only movies. Eventually his binging becomes so unhinged that his mind begins to unravel and his body begins to meld into the home theatre system and become one with it…
*To note, both of these stories are currently in different stages of development and writing. Perhaps one day I will finish them and they’ll be posted to this site.
As you can see from the above examples, I like to write wildly different types of stories and in different genres. That is because, at the end of the day, the person that I write for is me.
This is not to say that I don’t want others to read my stories and provide feedback. In fact, hearing that someone else has read and enjoyed a story that I wrote is what motivates me to continue on and to write even more frequently.
However, the reason that I carve out time to sit and write is because it is an activity that I love, and I want to explore questions that I haven’t found answers to anywhere else. What caused that couple to finally snap and go Rambo on their neighbour? What does obsession look like in its most extreme and grotesque depiction.
Simply put, what happens next?