Why I Write

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       One of the few things I believe the American school system gets right is that it treats reading and writing like equal and antithetical labors by default. There is no telling whether a student will thrive more in reading, which requires quick absorption of visual cues, or thrive more in writing, which requires creativity and attention to detail. As a child, I could not claim an automatic affinity to reading nor writing, which was also a legitimate outcome anticipated by my school and a position vaguely encouraged in all aspects of my childhood (except that of it being a female childhood, but I was much less aware of that fact at age eight than I am now). That encouragement, naturally, made me feel good. How could it not? It made me feel favored in the eyes of God, in that way you do when your dreams and goals align with things others believe are undeniably important. What I’ve come to realize years later, however, is that I can find few greater joys than that of writing.

 

       Truth be told, if the reasons to write were ranked in terms of their conduciveness to productivity, mine would fall on the lower end of the spectrum. I write for the same reason a person who likes to eat might learn to cook, i.e. so that I can enjoy the product I make. The things that make writing “liberating”, such as being able to type out absolutely anything I want onto a page, is a burden to me, similar to how a cook with access to every ingredient in the world might be indecisive in deciding what to cook. My best writing is produced not with the endless void of creativity clouding above my head, but when I force a little bit of tunnel vision into my mind. I also simply do not have the words for everything I want to say. 

 

       Part of the reason I struggle with the unending possibilities of writing is because I, despite myself, enjoyed fiction as a child. Like most kids, I assume, I used to read for plot, for the inherent excitement of a narrative structure. Also, like most kids, I enjoyed pretending I was part of a world more important than my own. However, as I got older, I developed an appreciation for how fiction cannot operate without realism. To me reading fulfills a key facet of the human experience: that of seeing it put into words. I write with the reader’s experience at the forefront of my mind, and ask myself all of the appropriate questions--how will this word change how my reader feels? How will this tone or this simile or this allusion change the way the reader thinks? How will it change what the reader thinks about me? Under the guise of fictional characters and worlds, I can deliver harsh truths obliquely, buffed at the edges, and with a little bit of sugar to help it go down. 

  

       Writing is therapeutic for me insofar as I can create a meaningful creative product. I find great joy in picking words and phrases that I find eloquent or powerful, and I also find joy in rearranging them to suit my taste. The true wonder I see in writing is that any aspect, micro or macro, can be beautiful. A word, a phrase, a sentence, a story, can each produce a pleasure so primitive it’s like oil on our high-speed human brains.