Why I Write

About a year ago I had an online Tarot reading with author Jenn Givhan. She gave me a wonderful reading, full of hope and promise. One exercise that she insisted I do was to write down Why I Write. I really liked the idea and I've thought about it tons, but I have yet to actually write down my reasons. So I'm going to give it a shot here!

My first answer is that I write to understand the world. I like the word understand - even though etemologists are confused by it. Knowing something is to stand under it - to let the weight of it cover you, to let yourself be subsumed by it. When I write it is as if I am standing under this vast world. I am in the roots holding up the tree of life and from this place underneath I understand.

Sometimes (oftentimes if I'm honest) I don't want to write. It's just so hard and scary. Sometimes I sit down to write and everything that comes out seems trite, wooden, dull, or some other equally depressing adjective. Sometimes I think it would be better if I took up a hobby that didn't ask for so much, that I could simply do for enjoyment and without the expectation of greatness. I often berate myself up for not spending enough time on writing, for not knowing the craft of story telling as well as I would like to, for spending all those years saying that I wanted to write and not doing it and therefor not putting in those precious practice hours.

But then, then I have a good writing day, or even a good writing half-hour. A writing session where I'm transported into the world I've created in my head, where everything outside my written world falls away and is not important - what is important is getting the next word and the next word down. What is important is listening to that small voice inside me that wants to share its secrets, the secrets of the lives of characters who walk around in my head like it's their home. It is a joy past any other, past the joy of my children, of sex, of food. It is a fleeting, painful joy because it asks so much and always wants more - more time, more energy - but those shining moments of living in my words, in my work, it is all I want. It is the memory of those times of clear flow that make me come back over and over. Those moments make me want to give my all to this art.

I also love my characters. I love how they talk to me before I go to sleep, when I'm walking the dogs, when I'm standing in line at the grocery store. They tell me things about their lives, about what they think or feel. Sometimes they are telling me about what I think or feel and hadn't ever really understood until I saw it in these characters I have created. Some of my characters are so real to me that I feel a little bad saying that I created them, perhaps I am simply a vessel for them to come into this world and it is their lives and dreams and fears that are important not mine. Some characters in fiction have done more than I ever will, have reached far more people, have made far more of an impact. Think Hamlet, Anna Karenina, Holden Caufield, Celie - all figments of imagination that resonate through our culture far longer than a mere mortal could.

But it isn't just my characters, writing makes me love the whole world. Or rather, it allows the love I have for everything to resonate around me. For example, the other day my son and I were at the hospital for an appointment and I felt low and droopy. But then I thought about writing, about describing the people in the hospital cafeteria, describing the cafeteria itself and suddenly I loved all of it. The specificity of the world is so beautiful, but without the eye of a writer I would pass over all that beauty. I'd be oblivious to someone's bright paisly scarf, or the way their nose sits on their face. Writing makes me notice, and noticing is love.

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