So today’s the National Day of Writing, I am told. As opposed, I guess, to the other 364 days…
Over on Twitter, there’s a hashtag of #whyiwrite. My reason is simple: same reason as #whyibreathe. I was born with words jumbling inside me, wanting to be put in order and set free, to try and move people into thinking or feeling or seeing differently than they did when they started reading. Or, as a print hanging on my wall explains:
He wrote secrete notes to people he hadn’t met yet. Some of them aren’t even born, he said, but we live in a strange neighborhood & they will need help figuring things out & I won’t always be around to explain it to them.*
I saw that print back …oh, over a decade now, and it resonated. I’m not so arrogant to think I’m the only guide someone needs… but I might be the guide that someone needs.
There’s a National Day of Writing? Huh. Too bad I likely won’t get much done today–ironically because it’s crit group night. Maybe I’ll try to stay up a bit later.
Why I write . . . I feel like that deserves a more profound answer than I’m likely to throw off the cuff. I write because I keep not stopping. I write because I know exactly what stories I want to experience. I write because a forty-year-old guy running around playing pretend might seem kind of creepy, while a forty-year-old guy in a coffee shop with a laptop is, at worst, a poser.
National Day of Writing? Yeah, as opposed to every other day… :)
But yeah, its good to stop and think “Why do I do this?”. It’s valuable for the writer and for those who read her work.