Occasionally, when the dark night of the soul comes and the demons of who we are come out to play there come questions which cannot be deflected. They can be ignored or they can be answered but they cannot be evaded and they usually begin with ‘why’?

Why do we write? Why do we stay up late at night? Why? Why? Why? The usual way to answer these is to come up with some blaster, to say a clever thing, to sound erudite, deep, interesting. What we do not want to be when we answer these questions is honest, because honesty will make us vulnerable. Honesty will make us seem flawed.

There is a part of the writer’s brain that is like a Time Machine. It displaces time and space. It transports him to the place he is writing about, it takes him out of his skin and puts him inside other people. It fragments his consciousness across many interesting lives, all brighter than his own. It makes him live in a world where vibrant things happen and when it’s over, the deed is done, he has to come out and say something and expect that to be full of brilliant meaning and wit.

I say ‘he’ here because I am writing about my own experience and sense of it and I am being, unusually candid, but it can easily be ‘she’. The point is that writing is even weirder than acting. Actors at least simply become one other person. Writers become many. They visualise not just people but also places and times. We tend to become gods, greater than the mortals we write about, lesser than them at the same time.

Writing becomes an act of creation and a journey of pain. It becomes a willingness to cut ourselves using our own vision and see just what kind of blood we bleed.

The worlds we create are visions of what may be. Books are a little prophetic because, depending on whom you listen to and what he has drunk at the time, either they are possible futures, events that have happened and are waiting to be discovered or are solid extrapolations of the future, they bear the seeds of our times and are like a dream writ large with a hidden message in the subtext waiting to be decoded.

Why do we write? Because we want to escape. Because living hurts and every day we don’t we feel like we are dying and yet in the words we write and in the characters we breathe life into we tend to feel more than we do in the real world, our words become greater than ourselves. The worlds we create more real than our present. We use out pain to drive us on and we discover other kinds of pain to experience in our words.

This vicariousness part of writing, this living by proxy takes a certain flawed psyche to endure, to crave even. We write because it hurts not to and we write because we are addicted to the pain we feel when we write.

This is as honest an account as it gets and, in reading it once, I realise why we usually lie. This sounds unhinged, deranged, the ranting of someone on the verge of lunacy. Quite frankly it is not. It may, perhaps, be possible to become a writer without feeling this, but it is impossible to become a good writer.