Why Write
Last week I watched Rebecca Miller’s documentary about her father, titled ARTHUR MILLER: WRITER. To hear the great Arthur Miller speak candidly about his work and his relationship with the theatre (and the critics) through the decades is to get an almost fly-on-the-wall insight into the highs and heartbreaks of life as an artist. It’s a loving portrait of the famous dramatist and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested not only in Miller’s body of work, but also in what motivates an artist to create.
In Miller’s words, writing is “a license to speak the unspeakable.” I guess you could say that all art, regardless of its form, is “a license to speak the unspeakable”or as I believe, it is the universal language in which we speak the unspeakable. If I had to bet, I’d say that most artists create in an effort to make sense of the world they inhabit: what they fear, what they hope for, and the questions they wrestle with. So can it be said that artists are in constant, sometimes painful pursuit of truth? Maybe every time a writer writes she has the chance to pen what Hemmingway called “that one true sentence,” and it’s the quest to find it that keeps us going back to the keyboard to tell stories.
