Why Write?

(Transcribed from notes recorded on March 18.)

I carry notebooks with me all the time. I have a small pocket-size Moleskine, a large Moleskine, a Notabilia and a large ledger. This is probably more notebooks than I should carry about, mainly because I’m always undecided over what to put in what notebook. I sometimes just sit and stare blankly at an empty page or copy stuff from one notebook to another and I generally spend more time just messing with the books than I do writing in them.

Now I’m starting to really be concerned about what I write. Times past, I would just jot down anything that popped into my head. Now I imagine people actually reading my notes (particularly my wife and kids) in the event of my death - an event I am becoming increasingly expectant of. I imagine my audience, then, as a body of curious mourners looking through my pitiful notes after my untimely death. I want them to find something promising and uplifting and that will reveal my inner-self to them in the best possible light. A tough chore. I probably should just stop writing stuff down altogether.

To make matters worse, I now have a blog. Stuff I put there is immediately accessible not only to them (my family) but to the whole online world. “We must consider our audience,” the experts say, but sometimes I feel safer and more comfortable imagining my only audience is me. “Why, then, write at all?” one might ask and I will have to ponder that for awhile and get back later on that.

Later -

I suppose the main reason I write is because I want to be a writer. Someone (Stephen King, I think) said, “A writer writes.” That makes perfect sense and is probably good enough reason, but the truth is that I want to connect with someone. I want someone to read something that I have written and say, “Yeah!” Another reason I write is it helps me “get stuff out.” Stuff such as now, March 18, 2008, as I sit here, the only customer in this Chinese restaurant at mid-afternoon on a cold, rainy day in Canton, OH and listen to the bubbling of an aquarium, the soft oriental music, the banter from the kitchen and feel my loneliness. Now, at my age, I realize there is nothing romantic about loneliness. No song or excellent journal entry or movie or book can ever make it desirable to me again. I have had my fill of it.

Sometimes loneliness can lead to despair- sometimes other things can lead there. Things such as finding out yesterday that my sister’s husband, Billy, had died after a long battle with cancer and the knowing that I have been more or less estranged from her and him and my brother and most of all my family for several years now for reasons too painful for me to write about now or probably forever and the fact that I am far from home and will probably not make it there for the funeral and that I would probably not go if I were home. And sometimes loneliness and despair can lead to depression and keep me there in its dark gloomy embrace until I break free, back to the light. And sometimes writing helps; helps get me back.

I write because I am a writer: because writing affirms that. “A writer writes.” It’s just that simple. And perhaps because my thoughts, sometimes feverishly, most times clumsily, scribbled down on paper, in whatever notebook I choose, may be all that I leave behind.