People sometimes ask me: why do you write? The short answer to this is simple: Because I want to be loved. That sounds good, doesn’t it. That sounds honest.
But, as far as I can tell, writers aren’t loved that much. There will always be more people around that hate their writing (and them) than supporters. If writers do what they do only because they want to be loved, then someone should tell them that there are hundreds of thousands of better possibilities to achieve this.
There must be more about writing. When I was a young boy, I once saw my mother making notes while she was talking on the phone. I had witnessed this before. But this time was different. I envied her, I wanted to be able to do that, too: Taking a pen, moving it over paper and drawing something that looked like a picture without being one. In the following weeks I filled endless pages scribbling, I painted signs that no one could read. Not even me. But it felt like writing. It felt important.
In elementary school, when I was able to read and write a bit, I found happiness in lists. I wasn’t much into books. I lacked focus for literature, I rarely ever made it to the end of a story. I preferred comics. My parents supported that kind of hobby, hoping I would sooner or later lose interest in it and grab a book by myself. Plus, at least I was reading text bubbles.
These comics were the first things I listed and were the only thing I wrote besides what I had to write in school. I remember this deeply satisfying feeling. The fact that I was writing was important, what I was writing was not. Soon I listed other things as well. Everything was put to paper: “Collection albums”, “Commodore Games”, “stuff” (including “29 mini divers”, “1 water necklace”, “6 mini transportation machines”, “3 Batman cards”). Even the ingredients of canned soups.
Everything needed to be listed. Sometimes in capital letters, sometimes in red, sometimes with high lighters, sometimes on sticky notes, sometimes underlined, sometimes copied. Finally, I drew a map of my room and marked with arrows where everything was, which posters were hanging on the walls, and also: Where I kept the lists that listed all that.
Once I had listed everything I could think of, I looked for a new task. I started taking notes about my classmates. I divided them into two obvious groups: boys and girls. On the far left I wrote down her or his name, next to their grade for “Friendliness”, and after that, the grade for “Evilness” and finally the overall grade, which could go from “Super good” (A) to “Alright” (C) all the way to “Yuck, terrible” (F). Some of the grades I crossed out.
This was because sometimes classmates who weren’t content with their grades would beg me to give them a better one. Usually I gave in (if they begged long enough). Additionally, I listed the phone numbers of my classmates and demanded them to sign my list. Only very few were okay with that. To convince them I wrote on the bottom of the page: Everyone who signs correctly will get something sometime and everyone who doesn’t won’t get anything.
And still I was thrilled by writing. It was everything to me. I created my own magazine. The first issue was titled: “the nutty one”. Above that it said: Everything inside is superb! But once again I was only attracted by the act of writing. I stole most of the content. A satirical text from MAD-Magazine and riddles of the Mickey Mouse Magazine, walkthroughs for Zelda from the Nintendo Club Magazine.
I copied the self-made pages in my father’s office and sold them at school for an impressive five Deutschmarks. Every magazine in the supermarket would have cost half the price. My classmates didn’t mind. Motivated by their interest I produced additional issues. And added a new title: NONTE (Which doesn’t mean anything in German either. I remember only trying to employ a word I had never heard before. I wanted to be original!)
That’s how I continued.
I wrote to write.
I believe there’s an archivist in every writer. When I write, I list ideas and memories and things I have observed in my head, choose only a few of them and put them together on paper. Of course, I also want to tell a story and not only fill blank pages. But honestly, what really keeps me going is the deep desire to put one word after the other. Maybe I think much longer about what word that might be, but in the end, I’m still writing lists. And I do it out of a simple urge: Because I need to.