Why I Write — And Why I Can’t Stop

✍️ People sometimes ask me, why do you write, Øivind?

All rights reserved © Øivind H. Solheim

Why I Write?

I could answer with one word: insight.

But the answer is more than instinct or need.

I write to live more fully.

And I write because I’m never quite done with what I need to understand.

📘 Every word I leave behind on the screen or on paper is a step into a kind of understanding I didn’t know I needed.

Sometimes it’s a character who opens something in me. Other times, it’s a sentence I feel in my gut before I fully understand what it means.

I don’t write for applause. I don’t write for money.

I write because I need to recognize the world — and myself — in something that doesn’t just rush past.

When I wrote the scene in White Lies where Anna comes home and senses that Tomas is gone, I knew immediately: I wasn’t just writing about her. I was writing about myself.

Her silence — that form of recognition where the body knows before the mind catches up —I’ve felt that too.