A Reason to Write by Leonoor Post

The darkness of the night was a deep blue. Or perhaps it gently laid a blanket over my exhausted eyes. One might even say that the streetlights winked at me just like she once did. When my eyelids finally fluttered, it was like butterfly wings closing, with a touch just as soft. These and some more analogies come to mind, but falteringly. You must know that I am not a very skilled metaphorist – though I wish I were. That night, I had spent the time waiting for the bus wondering how best to describe the colour of the sky. ‘Deep blue’ didn’t really cover the way I felt. I could, with some effort, describe all my surroundings, but the colour itself eluded me. It wasn’t the shade of my eyes, and not of the ocean either. That was about the length of the blue-imagery my tired mind could go, and it made me feel dejected, especially since I knew the camera on my cell phone would not be able to capture it completely either.

The times that words seem to run away from me, like that night at the bus stop, I sometimes wonder why it matters so much to me that I am not always able to articulate my feelings. Why do I care, when it is a rare occurrence for me to share my writing with others, when I am most often not writing with the intention of communicating anything? The answer is that nothing drives me as much as my own wish to be good at writing.

Why do I care, when it is a rare occurrence for me to share my writing with others, when I am most often not writing with the intention of communicating anything? 

I enjoy reading, but I very rarely stop thinking like an editor. In my mind, the words on the page are replaced by synonyms, the syntax changes for the better, and all punctuation mistakes disappear. However, there are also moments that my brain quiets and I can only be in utter awe of other people’s writing; for example, at the first Scope reading I attended. In that dark, crowded living room, where softly flickering candlelight-illuminated faces I had previously only seen on websites, there was one poem that touched me more than the others. Someone exclaimed that they had never read something this beautiful before. It might seem strange, but at the moment that statement did not feel exaggerated to me at all. The writing flowed. Grain by grain, every word followed the last one, and I could not imagine it being any other way; every sentence felt inevitable, and a small part of me felt envious.

The poem’s imagery of sand reminded me of one of my own past attempts to write. During my internship, my boss asked me to produce a poem; she wanted it to be about my experience of the Dutch sea and beach. I vowed to try to write smoothly. I wouldn’t think too much and instead type down anything that floated up to the opaque surface of my mind. I tried a number of times, but my confusion bled through in the same way it does now; I began to write about writing. That is how I ended up with opening sentences that I now look back upon and cringe (‘poems confuse me’ and the like). And, even more horribly, the words that followed were so extremely vulnerable that it was the absolute opposite of something to be commercialised. 

I write because I cannot seem to help it. I will forever be enamoured by the possibilities of language. I will also forever be frustrated by its limitations, and that frustration drives me. 

Please imagine me, on my own at a big wooden desk, the farthest that I had ever been from home, deep into an unfamiliar nig

ht, staring at my laptop in a way that resembles what I am doing now. Nothing outside of that Indian hotel room, with the fan whirring tiredly, seemed real. The isolation is, if you know what to look for, very easy to spot in the things I wrote that night. I did not hand in any of those poems to my boss (I wrote some literary prose instead), but some of them are among my favourite writings ever, simply because they are utterly honest.

All this to say: I write because I cannot seem to help it. I will forever be enamoured by the possibilities of language. I will also forever be frustrated by its limitations, and that frustration drives me. I do not always know what or how to write, but I never regret sitting down at my desk, which is now in a way more familiar room than during my internship. I promise that writing that you have put effort and vulnerability into will always be worth the time. Especially as someone with an at times quite bad long-term memory, it often feels like a relief that I have some tangible evidence of my thoughts. Additionally, I urge you, as the reader, to continuously and rigorously examine the limits of the written language, whether that is English or your mother tongue. Discover new ways to express things you didn’t think could be expressed. Find the most beautiful, the most haunted, the most nuanced words. Teach yourself new sentences, new styles. And whether your writing turns out to be something said a hundred times before or something completely new, I can tell you with all my heart that I look forward to reading it.