Writing as a necessity

Barcelona - Thursday, 02/11/2023 - 06:50

Let's ask the question: why does a writer feel the need to transfer their ideas to paper? "

It's not hard to find young people writing poetry at a young age. So the desire starts early. As if it were the oxygen needed for life to continue. That is, writing is an act that, whether good or bad, requires dedication: the thing that keeps you going.

The answers writers give to such a question are interesting. They seek the meaning of their own existence in order to understand themselves, they use writing as a space for self-assertion, multiplying the self, and for enduring and thus confronting death. Somehow the answers are always full''fantasies, like good creators.

Last week at the Festival of Humanities in Denia (Alicante), writers Marta Sanz and Edurne Portela and colleague and writer Jordi Amat gathered on the same stage. They discussed the lessons that literature can teach about the future.

This is an unusual proposal.

This sentence was unusual because novelists do not have a crystal ball to see what the future holds for us, but it was interesting for theorizing about what their stories about the present have to do with questions about the future.

One idea became clear: the authors, though writing out of selfish and necessary need, become notaries of the moment''and therefore the builders of our memory. And without memory there is nothing, a phrase authored by the three speakers. Thus, before the healing and even curative effect for each author, the readers win. A society in which people read is full of people with full intellectual health. And that in itself is so exciting that we should thank them every day.