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Why I Write - by Tom White - White Noise

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It’s Labor Day Weekend, my family is outside gallivanting, and here I am. Upstairs, shut in by the four corners of my dingy, dimly-lit quasi-hermitage. I have been working on this godforsaken piece (yes, the very one you are taking in, dear reader) for hours on end. All I have to show for it is yet another day of written humiliations. I lean back — craning my neck and flattening my hunchback — and close my eyes. I ask the Ghosts of Writers Past: “Why do I do this to myself?” Thomas Hobbes’ description of life could equally apply to writing. It is indeed “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To that list, I would add: unpleasant, burdensome, enervating. The process of writing is roundabout, clunky, and halting. The lopsided nature of the input (the grueling exertion) versus the output (the delicate page) is comically unjust. Extracting the perfect word from the recesses of the subconscious is similar to pulling gum from one’s hair: all pain, little progress. It is excruciating, a

Why I Write Toiling despite Tourette Tom White Oct 06, 2020 34 4 7 Share Subscribe Above: Truer Words have never been scrawled (and crossed out, and changed, and rewritten…) Why I Write Few people can be as tortured by writing as I am. —Virginia Woolf It’s 2:00AM and I am exhausted. I am tired of reworking this draft for the umpteenth time. I am tired of hunching like Quasimodo in this worn leather chair. I am tired of the vinyl tiles that checkerboard the ceiling. I am tired of pecking at my beat-up laptop, of willing coherent prose to appear on the blue screen. I am tired of being mocked by

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