The Reasons I Write

Ask yourself, “Why does anybody want to be a writer?”

It is not an easy thing to answer. Writing is hard. It tears at the edges of your mind until it leaves sores, infections, and permanent damage. Well, those of us who rewrite ourselves because of childhood trauma suffer from that anyway. And every horror and gut-twister and tear-jerker that you have written about haunts you again with every reread, proofread, secondary reread, and final edit. Unless, somehow, you don’t do those steps and it turns up real writing instead of horse-turd fertilizer by some minor but repeatable miracle. There are writers like that. They write about sparkly vampires and Mr. Gray’s sex dungeon.

I’m one of those writers who spuriously claims that I write because I have to. And that is not right either, I write because I HAVE TO!!! (IN ALL CAPS AND 3 EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!)

As a lifelong avid reader, I have read so many other people’s lives… so many other people’s stories, that I have lived a thousand lives and learned so much from each that it is my duty to put pencil and paper together to tell the tales that only I can write… or draw pictures of.

I am the man from the setting sun. I come from the future to deliver the past. -by Mickey

Whatever the hell that means, I have to say it. My writing may never get really read and understood because the world may come to an end too soon for anything I write to ever endure. And yet, the key to everything… to the survival of the human species… of life on Earth… may be buried somewhere in one of my ridiculous books. I may be the one to give ultimate meaning to everything that is or ever was on this little blue marble in the middle of all time and all space. Or maybe in one of the ridiculous plays by the man (whoever he really was) who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. It doesn’t matter who really wrote it. That key is out there somewhere. And it changes everything if found and understood.

So, the reasons I must write have to do with the philosophical horse-doo-doo that the Existentialists taught us. That nothing means anything… until we give it meaning. Even this sentence I write here and now means nothing unless I give it meaning. This is what we need writers for. To make everything mean something. It is a sacred duty.

I must make you laugh a little, cry a little, and feel a lot of fundamental things. And you must do that too if you are meant to be a writer. Believe me, it is the only gift God gives a man that is also a lifelong curse.