On writing today
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
When it comes right down to it, writing is a blasted stupid thing to do. It’s labor-intensive for both writer and reader. It is often misinterpreted. And stories have been conveyed far more easily between creator and consumer for more than a century through recorded film and music. Bottom line is that written stories take work. And yet this idea of transforming a mind’s series of images and feelings into a series of scraggly lines so that they can be transmitted to another person, who will turn those lines back into images and feelings, seems beyond labor-intensive. It seems like retrograde madness. And yet we as a species continue to do it.
Now, the medium may have changed from stone tables to papyrus scrolls to bound handwritten books to printed books to flickering letters on a screen, but the urge to write remains. Apart from the fact that human beings are natural storytellers, I think it still exists in part because it’s a tactile effort. The reader knows I push this pen or press this key and it becomes part of a word or a thought, an impression, a sensation, a life that one hopes will go on long after one’s bones have returned to the Earth. The author becomes less important than the message, than the effort made. I read an ancient tome by Plato or Marcus Aurelius—or even Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau—and I know some holy human connection has been made irrespective of time or place. Here is a life lived and conveyed, calling out to connect with me, to share what he or she knew well with what I may feel right now. The details of our own individual lives no longer matter. Just that connection.
Apart from reading a book, the only other place I have this feeling is sitting in the stark silence of a museum, looking at the statues and paintings formed by long-dead hands and resisting the desperate urge to touch them, to be in contact with another flawed human being who lived as I live, who cried as I cry, who loved as I love, so long ago.
But to much of the world, writing is useless. It is not lucrative. It is not easy. It is not a definitive career path. To those who love both doing it and reading it, it is obsessively time-consuming, sometimes frustrating, sometimes seemingly pointless. Rarely does really good writing go viral or does an ink-made truth form a bond among a myriad of people. Even more rarely is writing actually art, and able to form connections between not just people in its own time, but with people in all times going forward. As all art should, the almost impossible piece of exquisite writing endures all as endless beauty or simple truth or unique complexity, forever.
So why write? If it is something so difficult and so infrequently done well, why bother to write at all? Why write especially today when there are so many easier ways to tell a story, to forge a connection, to unearth a truth?
I don’t know if I can answer in any universal way. Writing for me is attached to my soul. I couldn’t not write any more than I could not love my wife and children. You ask me what I am? Writer above all, since I’ve been that the longest and because it’s the only lens through which I see the world. And yet also written on my soul are equally important things like husband and father, brother and friend, and once upon a time, son. I am all of those things and I can’t divorce myself from any of them. So to not write would be to deny a core part of myself. Writing is as much myself as my eyes and hands. It helps provide release to everything unspoken in my heart.
Do I wish my own writing reached more people? Yes. Do I wish it made me more money? Of course. Writing in the end is a communication. I push my pen in the hopes of stringing together a halfway decent sentence because I want to tell you about who I am and what I’ve seen and to see if it has any resonance for you. By writing, I want to hold your hand so that we both feel less lonely. By writing something short, I want you to have a quick love affair with me, something that will be warmly remembered in the dark, dancing on your moonlit ceilings decades hence. By writing something long, I want you to marry me, for us to go through our ups and downs together and to still recognize one another through the wrinkles and receding hairlines as the youthful faces that proposed undying love to one another. By writing anything at all, I want us both to whistle past our graves and know that our experiences live on because we have understood one another and that means someone else will understand us long after we are enveloped in the last sleep.
Why write? Because writing is the way I perceive the world and perceptions matter. You see it each time you watch a movie or a TV show. That’s someone’s perception. You see it in every object in a museum. You feel it in songs. In every artistic endeavor, you can see an individual life calling out: “This is me. I am here. Do you see me just as I am? Does this help you to see you too?”
These voices call out from the obvious places, the caressed old books and the yellow-lighted concert halls and the columned museums. But there are also just as artistic voices in those of troubadours playing in dish-clattering restaurants and in worn-down bars. They’re stacked out in neat lines of hope on fold-out tables set up at arts-and-crafts fairs, in crocheted dolls and animals, in hand-carved walking sticks and boxes, in folk art with price tags dangling, in self-published books piled high hoping for just a single reader or, God willing, two. All voices calling out. All lived led, seeking communion, communication, connection. Seeking the ever-present awe of understanding, voice to voice, body to body, soul to soul.
Why write? For me, it’s what I do. It’s who I am. And I want to share who I am with as many of you as I can before I die. Why write? So I can know I am not alone in my joy and in my grief, in my laughing cheer and in my glowering rage, in my moments of glory and in my nights of despair.
Why write? So that you know that I am here and that you are not alone and never will be alone.
