Author, author: Swollen writers' egos

Diana Athill
'One writes because one likes the sound of one's own voice' ... Diana Athill. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Guardian

For days an annoyingly simple-minded question has been nagging me: what makes a person - me, for one - want to write while others don't? The impulse must come from a long way back. A group of hunters came home to the cave and were asked: "How did it go?" Most of them grunted, "It was all right", like children being asked, "How was school today?" But one of them said: "Well, this happened and then that happened, and it turned out thus," and he was the most interesting of them, the one who liked the sound of his own voice and thereby learned that funny is funnier and extraordinary more so if shared - transferred from your own head into that of another person.

He was the first storyteller, a figure who was going to be valued in every society that ever developed, both as entertainer and recorder. Yes, but why him and not the others? It's like the Big Bang - we can guess how, but still don't know why.

I can remember that I began to like the sound of my own voice when I first turned it into written words. I wasn't a particularly articulate or amusing child, but when I started writing letters to my friends I became funny and enjoyed being it - even before the friends read the letters and said they were good, so it wasn't just the act of communication that gave me pleasure, it was the intention to communicate, a refinement of pleasure unavailable to the pre-literate. Once the storyteller had invented a set of symbols with which to preserve the spoken word, utterance became not only potentially enduring, but also more complex, to the point of occasionally shaping thought: to this day, I can be unaware of what I think about something until I see it appearing under my hand on paper.

So one writes because one likes the sound of one's own voice, wants to hear what it is going to say, and needs a listener, or rather a reader, to make what it says more real - to make it matter. This, I am sorry to say, suggests that, although writers differ from each other in many ways, there is one quality common to a lot of them: swollen egos. They are more likely than non-writers to listen to their own needs rather than yours (after 50 years of working with writers, many of whom I admired greatly and some of whom I was very fond of, I did come to the conclusion that to marry one would be a grave mistake).

The recorders - the historian and the biographer - are descendants of the first storyteller least likely to have a swollen ego, because research demands a great deal of hard work directed outwards, on to events or personalities unconnected with the writer's personal experience but commanding (at least while the writing is going on) pretty well all of his or her attention.

The entertainers, the writers of fiction, are another matter. The spinning of a story - sometimes, with great writers, the creation of a whole world - out of one's imagination can be an isolating occupation. Those fiction writers who adhere most closely to the storyteller's original role will play to the audience and derive energy from its response; but those whose imagination carries them on to another level - the writers most admired and envied by other writers such as I, who do not possess such imaginations - they are often left with so little energy to spare for life's ordinary occupations that they seem like monsters. And so can some writers in another category, which I think of as the diggers, who are not trying to answer the question "What was it like?" or "What happens?" but "What is it?" These are the philosophers, the scientists and (oddly enough) the autobiographers (not counting those of them who are "celebrities" or politicians).

Attempts to understand the nature of life are certainly not in themselves arrogant, and the discovery of answers to specific parts of the enigma can be of inestimable value, which surely applies to the writing of any serious scientist, but when it comes to the great unprovables of religion, any writer who is convinced that what he tells you is the absolute truth is, if not a monster, a menace. Which fortunately cannot be said of the autobiographer, who is merely trying to probe the nature of his own trivial morsel of experience and can be accused of nothing worse than self-importance.

To that, it seems to me, I as a perpetrator have to plead guilty. Innumerable people with lives far more interesting than mine have not felt impelled to probe their own experience, so why am I not among them, unless it's because I, like that primitive storyteller, enjoy the sound of my own voice? The people who brought me up and educated me considered that deplorable, and reminded me constantly during my childhood that I was "not the only pebble on the beach", so at some level I still shock myself when I write about my own life - but not so severely that I ever considered not doing it, or that I now regret doing it ... no, not for a moment.

So I conclude that, having asked a simple-minded question, I've got a simple-minded answer: some people descend from that first storyteller and some don't - so if having lived a story, you feel compelled to examine it in public, he's the reason. And whatever the value of an individual's contribution, we would all have remained much more ape-like without him.