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"Why Should We Write?"

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There's an interesting phenomenom I've noticed with the release of the first issue of The Oral Tradition: people go to the magazine's submission's page nearly as often as they look at the issue itself. This could mean any number of things, but I think it says something about writers nowadays. We seem to be more concerned with finding a place for our own voice to be heard than listening to other voices . . . and then we complain that no one is listening. This leads to the market being supersaturated, and brings me to a question I think will soon become essential to contemporary literature.

A certain question can come to define a certain age. Post-modernists asked "What should a poem be?" and modernists asked "Why should we continue to write the same way?" Before this, the typical question being answered in literature was "How should we live?" or "What is the good life?" I believe ours is "Why should we write?"

More people have more leisure time than ever before, and more people are trying their hand at writing (and succeeding for the most part). With all kinds of barriers having been broken by our predecessors, our choice of styles to express ourselves is nearly limitless. This means that we need, more than ever before, to have a deep understanding of our own goals and reasons for writing (if we're looking to be published, rather than writing for our own sake). This is an essential part of combining our impulse to write with the successful realization of our craft. When we understand why and how writing matters to us, our writing becomes far more impactful.

Maybe we all need to take a step back and really consider whether our work needs to be read by others.

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