Ah, Now I Know Why I Write

It’s really quite simple

Oct 07, 2025

Paitning of a skull on a manuscrupt — This writer wrote until the end

For years, I’ve been sitting here wondering why I write.

To earn money, to have a purpose, to have a job, for personal therapy, for status, ego, to purge the mind of thoughts, to save the world?

Why do this? Why sit day after day after day (and I have done) for years writing, for little or no financial gain? Why waste the energy? The time? The brain power? The earning potential from other jobs? Why introduce so much disappointment into a life when you get a rejection?

Why bother?

I’ve been asking this question for years. I’m 51 now, and while I have a ‘proper’ job, I still pound the keyboard every day.

Why do it?

What is so important that I have to get it down? Who do I think I am? Moses, delivering the ten commandments to the Israelites? Of course not. I’m just an English guy living in France in a small cottage with my wife, two cats, and 11 chickens. Life’s good.

Why ruin it by getting up on a Sunday morning and disappearing off to my ratty attic office to write? Haven’t you done this enough, Philip? Isn’t it time to stop? How about earning some money for God’s sake?

My wife is very supportive. She’s never told me to stop writing. Just like she’s never told me to stop drinking beer. I’d like to earn more money, and at times I have. But invariably, when this happens, I don’t get the time to write.

Writing is important to me. It makes me feel good to type away in the morning for a few hours. As Charles Bukowski said in a letter to the poet and publisher A. D. Winnans in 1985, about quitting his job at the Post Office at the age of 50, so he could have more time to write.

“It wasn’t that I was trying to be a writer. It was more like doing something that felt good.” — Charles Bukowski

When I read this, everything became clear.

I’ve never strived to be a writer. I never strived to be anything. I started writing one evening in about 1996. I had watched a sitcom on TV and thought I would like to write something like that.

It wasn’t that I thought I could do better or that I could even do it (I had never written a script before). I just thought it might be fun. That I might enjoy it. And I did.

For the next few weeks, I wrote an episode of a sitcom called Crushed Soup about four guys in a band in Nottingham, England, based on my own experience of being in a band.

Six months later, I’d written a six-episode series, which I sent off to the BBC Comedy Department. In those days, you could just send your manuscript off and probably get a reply. Which I did about four months later. It was a rejection, but they sent the entire manuscript back.

I forgot about it after that and went on to something else. But that was the start, and since then, wherever I’ve been, I’ve always written.

It’s what I do. Whether I class myself as a writer isn’t particularly important. I work as a groundsman, but I’m not a groundsman either. Before this, I worked as an English language teacher. Before that, a chef. But I’m not a teacher or a chef. I’m not really anything, and that feels good.

Bukowski never saw himself as a poet. The poet format simply suited his style. He could get down what he had in his mind as quickly as possible “with astonishing clarity,” as he said in a letter to William Packard, founder and editor of the New York Quarterly, in 1984.

I don’t write poetry; I’m quite happy writing prose or dialogue. It works for me, and when a piece comes together, it makes me feel good.

This piece was written on a whim this morning. I’d intended to go to the shop and run some errands. I had to pick up some money from a neighbour whom I did some work for last week. But something gripped me, and I had to sit down and write this.

I could have left it and picked up some shopping and the money first. Now I’m going to have to wait until Monday, as he’s a taxi driver and works afternoons and evenings, and I’m not going to disturb him on a Sunday.

Which sums up much of what I’ve been banging on about. I just like doing it. And I like doing it so much, I’m quite willing to put everything on hold for it.

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