“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” Ernest Hemingway
It can be said of life that it’s a mix of successes and disappointments; one grubby little compromise followed by another until eventually the whole thing ends. But less bleak than that because it also involves cocktails.
It could also, perhaps more accurately, be said of life that it’s all a bit too messy and complex to be distilled into trite slogans.
Sometimes it’s as irritating as the comedy series Miranda.
It can leave a sour taste, an itch you can’t reach, a sneeze that won’t come, a stranger’s tinny earphone leakage; the invasion of the yuppie and his sterility into the places where the wild things (used to) play.
When you’ve had your fill of the intimate smells of others on crowded trains and buses, or you’ve seen one too many shitty memes tagged LOLZ!!, or yet another cod-spiritualist aphorism swiped from a greeting card and posted on MyFace. When (shudder) the gin runs out…
That’s why I write.
Or as someone else once put it
“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” Graham Greene
Then again it’s bloody difficult
“I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking—which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.” Hunter S Thompson
Luckily, the gin can help
Write drunk; edit sober” Ernest Hemingway
That’s better. Why do you write?
__
PS: Yes this was just a transparent excuse to use that Hunter S Thompson quotation.
froodian pseudoanalysis 
“Write drunk; edit sober” That is the best advice ever
Damn straight… Or you could do a Bukowski – write drunk, edit drunker, maybe don’t really edit at all (eats into time at the bar)
Why do I blog? For the free books.
Not really, or at least not entirely. I blog to remember why I felt a certain way about a specific book and I liked the idea of encouraging people to read – it didn’t occur to me until later that the only people who would ever read a “book blog” are people who are already fairly literate. Now I don’t know.
Why do I write anything else? What Graham Greene said, particularly the madness and melancholia. I should read Ways of Escape at some point, Greene wrote one of my favorite books.
And gin can help most things.
Lots of people seem to agree with the Graham Greene quotation.
And yes about the gin, too…