Confession: I approach this topic with a certain queasiness. A palpable friction. Why do I write? Truthfully, I do not know and do not want to know.
For me, the “why” bifurcates. It faces two ways, a Janus. The first looks forward from the writing: What’s the aim of this, what’s its purpose, what’s its goal? For years, I have had mainly bad answers: approval, status, career, validation. I wrote to be loved. The problems with these motivations are self-evident, and I’m chuffed to say that today I’ve largely jettisoned them. Some effect on the “reader,” then, whoever they may be? I do occasionally hear from readers how a piece of my writing has touched them, helped them, even changed their lives. With effort, I believe these readers. But their words can’t be my reason to write—that’s too diffuse, and conflates writing and publishing, which I prefer to keep as separate as possible.
The other face of this Janus looks back: “Why” as in what’s the impetus, the reason, the rationale? I suppose it’s as simple as I always liked to read, and when I read something I really loved, I wanted to try it. I did this from a very young age—I have been trying to make something beautiful with words for as long as I could physically form their shapes.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
When I read chapter books, I began to write my own chapter books. I don’t claim these to be works of art, or even original. In fact, I find it poignant and enviable how unconcerned my girl self was with that. I wrote my own Boxcar Children, except their boxcar was in the Mojave, my own Sweet Valley High, except my twins had brown hair. I cannot recall, in these early days of writing, any queasiness at all.
There was no risk of overintellectualization, no hyperrationalization or brute utilitarianism. I had no fear of blabbing the mystery away. When I was a kid, no one asked about my writing, and I don’t remember wishing anyone would. It was just something I did. I don’t even remember wanting to be read. That came later, in school. In the beginning, writing was all process, no product. I liked the look of a spiral-bound notebook wrinkled with handwriting, the texture of wide-ruled pages stitched with words. But I liked better the feeling of making the marks.
I still do. I don’t Write every day but I do write every day. I wake up and make coffee and start a fire in the woodstove and write by hand in a cheap composition notebook. The vast majority of this writing is only for me. Sometimes, maybe when I’m in my notebook but just as often when I’m out and about, a scrap of language sets me tingling. I’ll turn it over in my mind for weeks or years. Stylistically, they are usually pretty ordinary, these scraps, sometimes even cliché. The one I’ve got going right now is “I don’t know how to do it.” Sometimes the scraps are not even words or phrases, but rather images. An early image for Gold Fame Citrus was the “bathtub ring” around Lake Mead—that terrifying white line exposed by the reservoir’s spectacular draining. Eventually, with enough will and time and grace and luck, I might paste these scraps into a book. It’s as much to get them out of me as it is to leave any sort of record, each book a scrapbook.
Writing feels good. That’s why I do it? Can’t be—it’s more often anguish.
Yet I remember being very young and writing a word and being physically delighted by its beauty, the sight and sound of it. Some letters were silent but changed the sounds of other letters—the wildness of that! Other letters seemed extra, and I loved them for that. (Much later I’d discover, at the core of Susan Sontag’s definition of style, uselessness.) I remember the shiver it gave me to make a word: an intense physical pleasure sent through me by the sudden appearance of beauty, by having become a conduit for some other force, by giving that force—god? nature? love?—sound and form.
I still seek this shiver, still try to become conduit. The word, I remember, was my own name.•
