After I recently published a guest post by Suzanne Sherman on my blog, I responded to her challenge to write nonstop for 10 minutes about why I write. What happened for me confirmed her discovery that “writing lets us dig deeper and find out what we really think about something.”
Here is my offering, but I’d love to see others take up the challenge and share their efforts with me:
I write because the world can be an ugly place, and words replace some of the ugliness. But I also love the ugly world, and I write so I can hold onto more of it and convince myself it’s real and will always be there.
I write because my fingers know how to pick out letters that cling to each other and make pictures much as the clouds did in the prairie sky where I grew up.
I write so I can rescue moments and days, a life in words that will still live after I die, making me a little immortal.
I write to see what’s inside of things and people. To explore what the surface eye can’t see but the writing one can. And as John McPhee said, I write to make sense of my life. Without writing I would be barren, bland, and unhappy. Writing helps me to smell, taste, touch, and see so much better, just as drawing or painting gives me a more intimate sense of my surroundings.
I write because it’s like drawing or painting but in words. I can tussle an image free from whatever I’m looking at, the tulip shaped red flowers on the hanging plant on my porch. The shadows that creep across my hickory floor offering panes of light a place to dance and move with the outdoor breezes.
I write because I love seeing what surfaces after words form and because, just as Joan Didion discovered for herself, I don’t know what I’m thinking until I put pen to page or fingers to computer keys.
What a rich residue of daily life writing contains. Why wouldn’t everyone want to write?