Scribo Ergo Sum, or The Paradox of a Writer

I recently started reading a collection of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published essays, entitled Both Flesh and Not.  If you haven't ever read anything by Foster Wallace, I highly suggest you do.  His writing is philosophical, literary, intellectual, and utterly relevant.  He's a "writer's writer."

As I fancy myself an intellectual and a writer, I find Foster Wallace's essays poignant and inspiring; the latest essay I read, though, 'The Empty Plenum', resounded with me in a way that reminded me why I pursued literary studies and why I have always lived for (and by) the written word.  In this essay, Foster Wallace discusses David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (which, I have to admit, I have never read and had not heard of before reading this essay) and examines, essentially, what makes fiction great.  He mentions several writers and novels I read in grad school, comparing those "works of genius" and others before getting to what was, to me, the heart of the essay: great fiction requires great writers, but what drives one to write?  "Ontological insecurity," the need to have our existence and experiences acknowledged, affirmed, and expressed:

The need to indite, inscribe - be its fulfillment exhilarating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither - springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads. On one side - the side a philosopher'd call "radically skeptical" or "solipsistic" - there's the feeling that one's head IS, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the big Exterior of life on earth.

He posits that writers are, in fact, empty plenums.  This paradox certainly describes all the aspiring writers I know.  Writers, as a general rule, tend to be deeply introspective and generally introverts.  We observe first and analyze every facet of every interaction.  This is not, however, to say that we are not fun-lovin', hell-raisin' party people; most of my writer friends are incredibly sociable, funny, and - let's face it - a little crazy.  Writers spend an unhealthy amount of time in our heads; character fault, personality flaw, whatever you want to call it, but I suspect that this omnipresent analysis of human behavior and interaction drives us to become social beings - whether to postpone examining our own psyches or to engage in social experimentation, testing out our hypotheses on friends or strangers.

The act of writing itself, however, is a lonely exercise.  One cannot write with distraction, as anyone who has ever had to write a college essay can attest.  While that essay you BS-ed on Sartre was simply a forced exercise, means to an end, grunt work, writers (on any level) write to get the Interior out.  We feel a compulsion to express, to share, to paint what is going on in our heads, and though we will eventually share our chef d'oeuvres with our loved ones, our muses, it is damn near impossible to interpret and delineate our mental drivel unless we cloister ourselves from any distractions.  The solitary act of writing may explain the procrastination of many writers: as observers, we are distracted by minutiae to a fault, and it is incredibly difficult to turn off this heightened sense of watchfulness to dig in one's heels and get to work.

I am not suggesting that my writing is on par with the greats, especially philosophical or existential, original, or even good.  I am, however, driven by the same compulsion that David Foster Wallace describes - the same compulsion that drives all writers, all artists.  I need to have my voice heard, I need to have my existence acknowledged, because all artists are, on some level, both slightly narcissistic and slightly insecure.  Psychoanalysts would have a field day with us, I'm sure, because you can't spend all that time in your own head, examining every word, every expression, every situation and action without becoming slightly neurotic.  I can, however, guarantee that we've already self-analyzed and used our own neuroses as inspiration for our work.  I write, therefore I am, because if you don't take the time to appreciate the human experience, it's over before you realize it.