Chapter 23 - Why do you write? To show the world its own dreams.
Q: What do you write? A: Words.
When asked what I write, I usually grunt and say, “words”, before making a hasty retreat.
When asked why I write, the most honest answer would be, “I don’t know, and even if I could afford a psychiatrist, I’m not sure that I’d want to find out.”
The phrase I once came up with when trying to sum up what I write was, “I want to show the world its own dreams.”
No doubt this is pretentious art-bollocks and sounds like something you’d read on a t-shirt or the blurb on the back of a book, but let me explain what I mean.
Imagine the world is a group of people, and your country is one of the people among them. It has views of itself, it thinks it is a pretty good guy deep down.
It means well, or at least tells itself that it does in order to get to sleep at night, and tries to convince other people of the same. It also likes to look at how well it stands in relation to others — how important it is, how popular.
The world wants to be loved. But when it sleeps, the …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Chapter 23 by James Garside to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.