I don’t remember which author said it, when or where they articulated it, perhaps many writers have expressed a similar view, but someone most definitely claimed they write to understand. It appears the sort of statement the late David Foster Wallace might have made. Maybe Haruki Murakami.

I’ve just Googled it. Ernest Hemingway.

It’s an assertion I’ve made many times since the first occasion I heard it, or read it. The expression immediately made sense to me. However, when I’ve tried to explain its meaning to folks, nearly all non-writers, I receive blank expressions. I can see them thinking, ‘the guy’s a nutcase’, or ‘surely he writes to entertain’. Most certainly they’re reasoning what can he possibly learn writing that he doesn’t already know?

A tonne of stuff, as a matter-of-fact. A strange chemistry occurs when writing. Particularly fiction. It forces you to make dozens, may be millions, of subconscious neural connections when you commit ideas to the page, particularly if you’re predisposed to writing the inner lives of unusual outsiders, or about unfamiliar situations and locations, in new genres and styles. You can spend days, weeks, months researching, getting under the skin of the subject or character, so there’s the simple studying process; making notes and learning new facts. But this isn’t what I mean.

When I say I write to understand, what I’m actually referring to is, when committing pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), I’m figuring out who I am, and trying to make sense of the bonkers world we live in. Writing is a form of hardcore reading. On steroids. Then amped up ’til the PA system explodes. It can also be like meditation.

The occasional intensity of thought when creating forces the mind to find gears I didn’t know existed. It’s as though I’ve entered some metaphysical psionic realm and find facts, words and phrases, metaphors and similes, descriptive language and so on, mined from places deep within my head. There are moments of extraordinary clarity of thought. As if an out-of-body experience. This detachment enables me to be simultaneously objective and subjective. I view the world, and my life, from new angles. The madness of being alive, the infinite number of random, unplaced jigsaw pieces we call life, arrange themselves together into patterns and pictures in such a way existence makes some sort of sense. Writing can be the act of consciousness, certainly processing information, on a higher plane. It can be euphoric too.

Absurdly, writing gives me time to think. Deeply. It could be writing brings a broom, and sweeps through my head, removing all the nonsense or nonessential, whilst also giving me permission to explore my subconscious, dredging up ideas, and to process information in novel ways. Who knows. It’s a kind of magic.

But the point is I’ve come to discover plenty about myself, all of us, and I’ve put some of that ‘novel’ thinking, about who we are and where we’re going, onto the page. I’ve leaned I’m resilient and sensitive. I’m thoughtful and disorganised. I’m borderline obsessive when I have a writing project inflight. This would explain my fascination with all things UFO, a theme of my debut novel. I’m presently outlining book number two and already the subject is obsessing me; a bildungsroman featuring an eighteen-year-old college dropout travelling with his grandmother across 1980s America. The point being I’m researching the people and places across those two-and-a-half thousand miles of city, prairie, desert and mountain. Quite literally, a journey of the mind.

Debut novel update #1: For those unaware, my debut novel is being published later in 2025 (date TBC, hopefully in the high summer). Final edits have been made following more than a year working with the editor to restructure/redraft. It’s now at the formatting and cover design stage. I’m super excited. Keep in mind, the idea was sown when I was completing my creative writing course at the University of East Anglia (UEA) fourteen years ago. And like a poor project manager, most activity occurred in these last three years. If you’ve got any advice for a newbie author like me, please drop me a line, or share in the comments. Drop me a line anyway.

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