Meh, to explore your own subconscious all you really need to do is surround yourself with the things and people you like and you'll discover things about yourself you never really knew. That's what New Years is for, right?


As for what I think of writing?

I think writing is hard, sometimes even savagely brutal. It's not something I can pressure myself into and yet I constantly think about it. It's the worst thing in the world but I still love to do it.
I could quite possibly be completely insane.

To find your introverted subconscious, you should extrovert? I'll have to think about that.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow

But, at the current point in my life, I'm not actually interested in communicating with anyone or doing anything specifically for the benefit of an audience. Now I'm more interested in writing as a tool to organize my own thoughts and explore my subconscious, maybe find some personal meaning in the world.

"For the instinct is sure, that prompts him
to tell his brother what he thinks. He then
learns that in going down into the secrets
of his own mind he has descended into the
secrets of all minds. He learns that he who
has mastered any law in his private thoughts,
is master to that extent of all men whose
language he speaks, and of all into whose
language his own can be translated. The
poet, in utter solitude remembering his
spontaneous thoughts and recording them,
is found to have recorded that which men
in crowded cities find true to them also."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



For me this answers the how, as well as yielding an experience odd and elusive enough to also answer the why.

Quote: Original post by Splinter of Chaos
To find your introverted subconscious, you should extrovert? I'll have to think about that.

Well when you get drunk...

What is writing for? My five Swedish Krona goes to these three reasons:

a) It is shared daydreaming. (people with poor imagination benefits from people with good imagination and the person with good imagination can keep on dreaming)
b) It is packaging a personal trauma/injustice that the writer don't believe can be understood by anyone who not has been in the exact same situation as the writer. Then the writing is like bottle mail that is thrown into the ocean in hope for external understanding. (written for reaching a feeling of communion and read as a practice in empathy)
c) It is an exploration of a political/religious/philosophical matters. The writer is adding and subtracting and trying to make what no human have ever experienced into a convincing argument/story (and thus maybe expand human understanding).

I can see some flaws with this line up of reasons but I have assumed that most writers work long and hard for very little money, all alone. There must be a very strong personal reason for writing. But one way of answering this question is by answering what writing is NOT for and then reverse the argument. By doing this it is clear that we have assumed several preconditions for the question and the limitations of writing. So three reasons are still "ok", I guess.

//Reep

Writing is for everything, I think.

By that, I mean that one can write for nearly any conceivable reason. People will write any piece for any purpose - I don't think you can have two people who completely agree on the both means and motive in fine detail.

For me, writing opens up an avenue of expression that I don't always have in speech. In personal writing, I can figure out my thoughts before I present them, and it helps avoid situations where I could miscommunicate with somebody. It also provides me with a way to check myself. Reading what I write sometimes provides me with a better memory of something than my brain could.

In the professional world (which seems beyond the scope of the question, if there's no interest in writing for an audience), writing might provide me with a bridge to any number of disciplines. No matter what I studied in school - being able to write about it opens up opportunities, and the potential for secondary income.

Either way you slice it, it's useful. Too useful to ignore when developing a skillset.