The Venn diagram of writers and Romantics is a circle.

My life—like most I’d imagine—is not a novel, but a collection of stories.

Joan Didion wrote that she wrote to find out exactly what it was she was thinking, how she felt about a certain thing. While I would like it to be, this has not been my case. I write for assignments and for money. To find out what I think or how I feel is only a byproduct, one I get only from time to time.

But for work, money, or grief, still I write.

The Venn diagram of writers and Romantics is a circle. The need to write something down  — or to even have the idea to at all — is inherent to the romantics. 

By this, I don’t mean that every person belonging to the group exudes delight, idealism, or even good attitudes much of the time. In fact, some of the greatest writers were self proclaimed cynics. 

Cynics though, with an innate talent for noticing, for feeling; packaged with desires to understand, wishes to capture, stories to tell. It is, at times, an annoying ailment, and often comes with a predisposition to malcontent and melancholy. 

I am 25 and have still to figure out if giving into the compulsion of writing alleviates or exacerbates these feelings. Still I write. For people like me, it’s compulsory, after all.

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“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it…I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” - Joan Didion on keeping a notebook