It was Christmas Eve. I was sitting on my couch with a fever, tissues, and my cat. I wanted to watch a movie so that I could feel like I was in the company of someone. Anyone. That someone turned out to be Vince Vaughn. I watched The Break Up.

I don’t know if it was the fever, the movie, or the nyquil but I bawled. I was too young to feel like a single woman’s cliche. I was angry. At everyone. My ex boyfriend for not calling me. My neighbors for playing hip hop music too loud. All the happy people celebrating the holidays. I hated them.

I spent Christmas Day at Sabbie’s house. I was barely sustained by advil and caffeine but I needed to be in the presence of something other than my own anger.

The next day I came back home to my apartment, digested more nyquil and fell asleep on the couch. I had an image of maps. When I awoke I drifted to my computer and started writing. Writing so urgently that your fingers can not keep up with your thoughts. Writing your wounds into words.

I spent the next couple of days sequestered in the corner of my apartment, feasting on tea and tylenol, turning off the ringers on my phones, and talking to my computer screen as if someone were on the other side. My characters, who were originally faint sketches, slowly fleshed out before me. I saw them. I talked to them. Oh, you would never do that in that situation. Why did you make that choice?

Friends started leaving messages. “Are you mad at me?” “Are you still alive?”

It was self-indulgent but I couldn’t break away. I had to let the characters unfurl before I was ready to head back into my own dreary life.

I explained this to my friend Ilana and she directed me to Orhan Pamuk’s nobel speech which was published in The New Yorker. This excerpt caught my attention:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward.The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build.

If this blog were written by a true literary jinius, this is the part where I start talking about how I created a masterpiece. I’ll be honest here. It’s flawed. But the heart of it, the soul, the foundation is what I am proud of. It’s funny because I wrote this at my most loneliest and angriest and I ended up writing a comedy.

I’m sure many people will not understand my anti-social behavior. They’ll call it selfish and strange. But when I think this I remember my mother telling me that when I was very young, maybe 4 or 5, she would walk into my room and find me talking to myself. Just chatting away at god knows who.

I write to satisfy the characters in my head. To let them play. And I will stop writing when they stop talking.

So tell me, why do you write?