Why I Write

I’ve loved books for as far back as my memory reaches. I loved when my parents would read to me, and after I learned to read on my own I regularly found or fabricated quiet, comfortable places away from everyone else where I could disappear into a book. I still vividly recall reading in a fort I’d made by draping a blanket over the back of the couch, or after lights out beneath the bedcovers with a flashlight, or sunk into a nest of pillows beside the warmth of the thrumming clothes dryer in our frigid basement laundry room.

I’ve wanted to be a writer for nearly as long as I’ve been in love with books. The only clear and enduring memory I have that predates my desire to write stories is my memory of being able to fly.

The first thing I can remember writing was imitation: I wrote Allerednic, a retelling of the Cinderella tale with a young boy as the central character. The work did not survive the ensuing decades — nor probably the end of the week — so I remember nothing about the plot. What I do remember is the thrill of invention, of creation, the burgeoning recognition that I could think up a story, characters, and places, and with pencil and paper bring it all into the world.

Maybe there was then some feeling of power, of agency, of being in control, but mostly I suspect it felt to me like magic.

Because magic is still how it feels.

This feeling that there was magic in stories grew and intensified as I read more deeply and broadly. I discovered that books could make me weep, could make the world around me disappear, could somehow disconnect me from time so that hours could pass, shadows could creep slantingly across the floor, the sun could sink away and day give way to night, and I would look up, blink, and with astonishment find myself in the future and in a world that was changed — ineffably, almost imperceptibly, but inescapably changed.

Magic.

Of course, the change was happening not out there, but in here, within me, and over time I came to recognize that reading was giving me different ways of seeing. Not just different things to see — though there is much of that — but new perspectives on people, on places, on history, on ideas. It is as though reading developed in me a set of new senses.

I applied this week to be Writer in Residence for a few months at a local library, mentoring other writers, developing and presenting writing workshops, and making some progress on my own work (novel #2). The application included a question that might have left me stumped at another point in my life, but I was pleased to find that the answer flowed from me, that I genuinely had something meaningful to say.

The question was “What do you feel is the biggest challenge facing writers today, and how would you address this in your role as a Writer in Residence?”

Here is my answer:

With the relentless grind of capitalism and the pernicious influence of social media to always be performing, succeeding, pleasing, and profiting, the audacious act of writing just for the sheer joy of creation is in peril.

As writers, we feel or we’re told that we have to sell our work, we have to build an audience, we have to be influencers, we have to generate content, we have to get paid.

I'd want all of my work as a Writer in Residence to inspire and encourage writing for its own sake, for discovery, for expression, for growth, for the sheer joy of creation.

I’ll update you here when I learn whether I’ve been selected. Either way, my answer to this question has had the surprising effect of inspiring me, and is as good a manifesto and resolution as I could hope to conjure.

Here’s to finding the magic again.