Experience has a way of evaporating. A moment occurs, and it immediately sprouts wings and flutters off to be forgotten. But writing can change that. Writing is the pin that tacks that moment to a board, keeping it in place rather than letting it flutter away. Writing is adhesive. Writing defeats time—the erasure of time. Even as a little kid, I was distressed to realize how relentlessly time moved forward, sweeping along with it every bit of life. Good things, bad things, even ordinary things—all gone in an instant, and you could do nothing but rake your memory to re-create it. That is, unless you wrote it down.
By writing, you gave an experience heft, permanence. From the moment I began to write, I loved feeling like I could overcome the corrosive effect of time and make life stick to a page forever. At the end of one memorable family trip, I was so bereft, picturing it as a vanishing piece of the past, that I sat down and wrote a detailed account of it. Suddenly, it felt reanimated, preserved so that I could revisit it indefinitely. I had conquered time.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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Why do I write what I write about? Part of me yearns to be a tour guide, taking readers to places they otherwise wouldn’t go. I’m the most subversive of tour guides, because I love taking readers to places they are pretty sure they don’t want to go; I believe they can be convinced of the merits if I can get them there. It’s a big, wide world, but most of us perch on our slender slice of it. In my work, I range far and wide and lead you into the unknown. I have tagged along with club kids, with women attending fertility festivals in Bhutan, with a world-class show dog, with members of the Tonya Harding Fan Club. I have climbed Mount Fuji and attended children’s beauty pageants.
I want to discover what’s extraordinary and illuminate what’s ordinary. If I can tell the story compellingly enough, urgently enough, and seductively enough, I can get you to follow me and see what I’ve seen and, I hope, see how thrilling it is to step outside yourself. If I do my job well, maybe readers will see the world a bit differently.
Maybe they will discover that they have the capacity to care or will simply find that they can surprise themselves with interest where they thought they had none.
I write because I love language. I love cobbling together sentences, neatly fitting one word after another. It’s like fine carpentry, notching and fitting pieces together. I like the musicality of writing, the way you can feel the words rising and falling, speeding up and slowing down. How amazing is it that with simple marks on a page you can evoke a very specific image? I describe someone, and just like that, you can picture them. I will never get over how cool that is, to be able to convey a sound, a smell, an image by choosing the right word combination.
I write because, in my heart of hearts, I want to experience the world fully. Being a writer is permission to wonder about anything at all and learn about it. It’s license to be a perpetual student, poking into whatever seems interesting or puzzling or funny or weird and coming back to tell the tale. A writer has the satisfaction of curiosity as her mandate, and I am a very curious person. What is it like to be a 10-year-old boy? A mule? A surf girl? Bill Blass? A high school basketball champion? To hike in a Florida swamp? To investigate the largest library fire in American history? I write so I can ask those questions and answer them and make you see why I cared to know in the first place. As you will learn, I cared to know because they are all part of the infinitely complex, sometimes baffling, often gorgeous nature of being alive and living among others.
I write because I love to write, because it gives me my place in the world; I write because it feels important; I write because I must.•
THE LIBRARY BOOK, BY SUSAN ORLEAN
