Greg Knapp- Why I Write

In many ways I was able to relate to Joan Didion. Didion talked of her life in college. "All I knew then was what I wasn’t". I can relate to this in the way that I have no idea what I want to do or who I am yet. I am looking for that missing piece of the puzzle much like Didion was at one point of her life. I like when she refers to writing as a secret bully. This made a lot of sense to me. She states, “setting words on paper is […] an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space”. After reading this a few times it made me think. Even if you are not writing a persuasive paper, you are still making the reader second guess his or her thoughts. When a reader reads someone else’s thoughts, their own thoughts are open to change. She had a very valid point.

This reading reminded me of the blog that we had to write over whether or not we considered ourselves writers. Didion states, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means”. I wrote something to this affect on that blog. I stated that a writer is someone who writes when they have no other way of expressing themselves or when they have uncontrollable urges to simply write. She is obviously a writer. She speaks of a “shimmer” which is what I believe to be something that a writer possesses. She can easily make a story up of anyone one she wants to which gives her the power to be a writer.