Why I Write

I write … I write because I have so many stores in my head. Not fantasy, not the usual monkey brain stuff the Buddha talks about where the brain is always so busy thinking, thinking, thinking. These are people stories, places stories, sometimes scary, sometimes so off-beat they don’t make any sense, sometimes a search for answers, and they streak across my brain like bolts of lightning that emerge from sightings of billboards, automobiles, old ladies crossing the street, dark alleys and dirt…

Imagine for a moment that you are three years old, walking with three-year-old confidence, talking like three-year-old confidence and thinking well, thinking this: There’ are two batteries on the ground outside the kitchen door, big batteries (the kind that fit in big old flashlights) and suddenly you’re building a gas station, where the batteries are really the pumps. You create a road out of popsicle sticks and a farmer drives up to the pumps on a tractor and the attendant comes out and fills his tank, takes out a gun and …

That’s how it works for me. Little things like batteries and sometimes big things like buildings, the kind that have windows that don’t open lest somebody decides to get some air but they are windows that can be broken, especially if someone pushes his cantankerous old boss, swivel chair and all, out that window that thirty story high window that doesn’t open the normal way, and you hear the thud of the body …

That’s why I write. These things have to get out of my head. They want a life of their own and I’m powerless to stop them from breathing until I let them out.

Once, before word processors became so affordable, I started typing on this clunky old manual typewriter at eight pm and seven hours later and twenty thousand words, I had to stop because that’s all there was. I’d spun this tale set off by a box of Cherrios (they don’t make you cheery), and ended up at a wedding on a hill, under the only tree …

(I don’t know what happened to that story but I remember writing it. My writing life didn’t have a backup disk then; it does now and it’s filled with finished novels, unfinished novels, finished short stories, unfinished short stories, dozens of unpublished articles and hundreds of published articles.)

I write … I write because my vocabulary scares my friends when I speak.

I write … I write because words on a page flow more easily than words from the mouth.

I write … I write because I enjoy the process.

I write … I write because I live.

Why do you write?