Some people write to find clarity or to calm an inner tempest. I imagine these people curled up with a pen and notebook, throwing ink on paper at the speed of thought.
I have never done this on purpose.
Others write to teach or to share knowledge, to convince, to compel, or to prove a point. This is what I do when I pontificate on Facebook about politics. It’s what I do at work. But it’s not why I write.
When I write, I lie with my head resting on a pillow and my laptop resting on my chest. One might see me there and say that my heart beats the words up through the base of the laptop and onto the screen, as if zeal and passion draw the sentences from my body to the page. It would be a fitting metaphor for the scene if it were true. But great passion is not something I have ever been accused of possessing.
Instead, picture a friendly T. rex on its back in bed, its head propped ever so slightly up and its comical little arms awkwardly bent inward, pecking away at keys. An apex predator playing with words, ideas, and story, that would be me.
I write to make the hard and ordinary beautiful. I write to surprise myself, because I don’t know where a story will go, even a true story, until I follow the rhythm of a sentence, until I stumble upon a leitmotif of metaphor that doubles back on itself, reinventing and reframing an idea again and again.
I write because when I visit foreign cities, I want to follow the dark alleys and cobblestone paths wherever they lead. And that, for me, is the path of writing—a mystery that begins with, say, a phrase about finding clarity, unexpectedly detours through the bed of a vulnerable dinosaur, and then gets lost in a dark alley.
I write because I want to be lost and found.
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Why do you write? Or if you don’t write, why do you read? And what animal do you look like when you’re doing your writing and reading? Leave me a comment to let me know!
This one’s obviously a shorter piece than the last several—any thoughts on the length?