To write is to entertain.
To document, maybe.
Like every other art, it prods the consumer to feel the same emotion as the creator.
And people seem to love themselves as much as they like being part of something bigger.
But writing like everything else pops best when it is the opposite of what everyone is expecting.
I think he believed that our job, the job of a writer, is not to get up and say, “Tomorrow, in battle, most of you will die.…” Instead, a writer must entertain the troops the night before. I think he believed that the best way to entertain the troops is to tell stories, and the ones that they seem to like the best are ones about themselves. You can tell sweet lies or bitter truths, and both seem to help, but it’s like Czeslaw Milosz said when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
–Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
