Why she writes

So. I don't even remember how or why I came across this, but I somehow ended up enraptured by this Joan Didion piece titled "Why I Write" while at work today. I've read bits of it before, but never the piece in its entirety.

I've been thinking a lot lately about WHY I want to pursue journalism (especially in this financial, and let's face it, social, climate), because my answer used to be pretty basic. Because I love to meet new people, and I love to write. I feel more comfortable expressing myself through writing than speaking. I'm not a math whiz, and my desire to have a standard 9-5 is negligible at best.

But those aren't good enough reasons, really. I'm still trying to figure out a more solid answer, but until then, these are the bits that really gave me pause:

"During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral."

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want to what I fear."

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All i know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning ofthe object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture Nota bene:

It tells you.

You don't tell it."

"Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel."