by Joseph Zavarella

Created on: September 06, 2008   Last Updated: October 04, 2008

WHY WE WRITE

Writing presents a wonderful way to both expose your ego while remaining quite anonymous as the reader hasn't a clue about who or what you are. In a sense the gulf created between the writer and the potential reader can span not only miles on the surface, but millennia in the annals of the history of mankind. It is the one communication between and among those speaking a common language that can be spat upon without actually offending the writer. The reader in this case may have been offended, but is not able to reach out and strangle the writer. Hence, writing is the perfect communication device designed for maximum impact with a minimum risk for bodily harm to the writer. The one drawback to writing is that in order for it to have an impact it must first be read, interpreted and then responded to in some way.

So many writers are too full of themselves to be taken seriously. What I mean by that is those who are enthralled with their own ability to write reams of prose without caring about the reason for writing the words written as long as the reader knows who has written them. Substance and courage is what usually separates the bores from those who actually have something to say. Admittedly this is the kind of stuff many writers would consider heresy, but one of the things we need to be mindful of is that we are all painted in the same light as the worst of us, and in some cases, albeit rarely, by the best of us.

Print is such a neatly packaged device for writers to be hidden from exposure while making outrageous remarks about people, groups and things. It serves well those mal-contents among us who have something to say and now have a vehicle upon which to say it. The internet with its plethora of blog sites and other interactive kinds of opportunities for writers to display their wares is the ideal graveyard for meaningful, intellectual thoughts. There was a time when writers simply developed manuscripts, neatly packaged them complete with SASEs into large, brown envelopes and sent them off to the desks of editors where it might sit for months sometimes years in a slush pile of other manuscripts all of whom holding the dreams of hopeful, and naive writers; the internet represents, perhaps, a different graveyard, but both with the same final result.

In my view people write a lot just for the sake of writing. In fact, some people talk about writing with such reverence that it's almost embarrassing to read what they've written. This is probably a

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