Why Write?

---

As the saying goes, if you have eyes, you could see. If you learned your ABCs in grades school, and still have usable eyes, then you could read. Notwithstanding your eyes, if one is visually-impaired (the politically correct term for the blind), if you still have fingers, then you could read. As François Bacon once said: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” But writing is more mental than just reading.

Once in a while, as a reader, has anyone of us ever stopped and asked the question: why is this author writing about this stuff? A written stuff could be a fascinating novel, a lonely poem, an esoteric essay, a scientific treatise, an employment contract, a comic book, a controversial blog’s post, a love letter, or a simple scribble on the wall.

Why do writers write? That question had lingered for eons when the simple scratches on a stone or tree bark, whichever history one fancy, man discovered that with these simple scratches he could mark the place where the deer and the antelopes play; where a lost love laid to rest; or where he was at a certain time and place.

Writing developed independently in several locations in the Near East, China, the Indus Valley, and Central America. The ancestors of modern alphabets were the iconographic and ideographic symbols developed by ancient man, such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics. The first known alphabet, a combination of a number of early pictographic symbols known as North Semetic, was developed between 1700 and 1500 BC. Four other alphabets, South Semetic, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Greek, had evolved from the North Semetic alphabet by 1000 BC. The Roman alphabet, used by all the languages of western Europe including English, was derived from the Greek alphabet sometime after 500 BC. The Roman alphabet became one of the most widespread due to the extensive use of the Latin language during the reign of the Roman Empire. The development of alphabets was significant in the development of advanced civilizations because it allowed history and ideas to be written down, rather than memorized and passed along orally (Crofton, 1990).

Armed with alphabets, written symbols transmitting the actual words and sounds of a particular language, oral myths and medieval tales were written down. Classical literature soon developed. Yet up to the 16th century, verse was the dominant literary mode, then the novel—an extended prose narrative—emerged. Journalism, originally applied to recording news by means of the printed word, was born. The Scottish essayist and historian, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) described the press as “the Fourth Estate, more important than the three traditional powerful estates of the Monarch, the Lords and the Commons” (Crofton, 1990)

The invention of the Internet in 1982 from the ARPANET of the 60’s, then with Tim Berners-Lee developing the hypertext standards in 1989, the Web came into existence (Griffiths, 2002). The Internet and Web, both based on open architecture, allowed Ward Cunningham to invent the wiki, generic software that offers a way of editing or organizing information within an article, and spreading this information to other articles. Moreover, GeoCities, Tripod and others hosted personal home pages, precursors to the blogs of today (Zittrain, 2008).

---

After self-studying Berners-Lee’s HTML for a month then signing up for HoTMaiL, I joined GeoCities and created my first web page on 25 May 1997. I also tried wikis, but learning another web language put me off, although remnants of my entries at Wikipedia and related sites still exists. At GeoCities, I wrote just about everything—news, prose (from essays, commentary to novel), poems, critique, reviews, tutorials, editorials, humor and even dabbled in non-written forms, e.g., caricature, wysiwygs, and puzzles. Eventually, I volunteered as a GeoCities Community Leader in February 1998, and was elevated into a Suburb Co-Liaison three months later. When Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999, I switched to Yahoo!Mail. On 09 July 2009, I received an email from Yahoo! GeoCities announcing that “Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.” I already said my goodbyes!

The transition from GeoCities homesteading to blogs, instead of wikis, was much easier for me. Yet, I only decided to be a full-time blogger in June 2008 after realizing that WordPress blogs were more similar to what I have been doing at GeoCities than editing wikis. Blogs were more personal to me than updating my GeoCities pages. In due time, «The Grey Chronicles» became sort of a daily habit, more so with the imminent end of GeoCities.

On the Web, content is king. Thus, the topics I chose to blog about are subjects I certainly knew about enough to sustain readership. I could not just rehash or rewrite all that I have written in my several GeoCities web sites then reformat it to suit the WordPress style. Based on my experiences, wise or otherwise, I write better when I am passionate about something. Bloggers, Mark Glaser (2008) wrote, “talk in their own voice, celebrate their unique identity and tell the stories that are real to them.” I aim to do that, too. I write posts that have lingered in my mind for several years but never have really been written by me with actual words and sentences until I had this blog. Some of them, I wrote just for the sake of putting the idea “to bed.” When I do have the luxury of time, I would also devote it to do research on topics, which are destined to be posts, but lack substantive data to bolster the arguments.

There is really no point in writing a post which is as alien as the green men from Mars, unless one is from the Red Planet. Doing so, it would be a disservice to the craft of writing as well as a sure way to be totally unnoticed. Once ignored, it would take time to pull readers back in. Blog readers are really a picky bunch. What they don’t like to read, they could easily click another link. My GeoCities pages, even though updated once-weekly, thus virtually static pages, took years before it broke the million-mark visitors’ total page views since its debut. It even counted my own page views. With the daily-updates «The Grey Chronicles», however, the site only averaged about 50 to 100 page-views per day, my own visits not counted. I estimate that it would take about 10 years before it could hit the million-mark total page-views. I am not even being modest; but with millions of other blogs out there, plus the fact that my posts are very personal, it is imperative that I keep my promise of giving the readers something of value or something other blogs were not saying, to maintain the site’s conversation with my audience. Not that I am more concern with the traffic, but readers of this blog are more important than mere site statistics. Even though on the Web, content is king; I would be mindful of my readers! They have usable eyes, and intelligent minds; thus they could read; and maybe comment on what’s on their minds.

---

Notes:

Crofton, Ian [ed.] (1990). The Guinness Encyclopedia. Middlesex, U.K.: Guinness Publishing, 1990. p. 604-605, 628, 654. back to text: 1 | 2.

Glaser, Mark (2008). What Really Makes A Blog Shine, Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. Reporters Without Borders, March 2008. p. 33. back to text.

Griffiths, Richard T. (2002). From ARPANET to World Wide Web, History of the Internet, Internet for Historians (and just about everyone else). Leiden: Leiden University, 11 October 2002. back to text.

Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. pp. 95, 119, 151, back to text.

Disclaimer: The posts on this site do not necessarily represent any organization’s positions, strategies or opinions; and unless otherwise expressly stated, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.